Lightbits Labs, the developer of the NVMe over TCP storage protocol, reported significant growth and increased customer adoption in 2025 as enterprises move towards software-defined, NVMe over TCP-based storage solutions to modernize data platforms.
Lightbits Labs concluded 2025 with accelerated adoption across various sectors, including financial services, e-commerce, neo-clouds, and cloud service providers. This shift is driven by organizations addressing the performance limitations and rising costs associated with legacy SAN and HCI architectures, which often struggle to deliver consistent high-performance and efficiency at scale. The data infrastructure market is transitioning towards disaggregated, software-defined storage (SDS) utilizing NVMe/TCP, a transition Lightbits Labs has played a key role in pioneering.
Eran Kirzner, CEO and co-founder of Lightbits Labs, commented on the market shift: “Today’s AI Training and Inference, real-time analytics and transactional workloads have fundamentally shifted storage decisions. We’re seeing this show up directly in how customers buy.” He noted a 3X year-over-year increase in software purchases, a corresponding rise in new customers, and a 2X increase in average deal size. The company also recorded a new high with a first-time deployment purchase exceeding 4X capacity. Kirzner stated that this growth indicates the architecture’s effectiveness in production environments, not solely in benchmarks.
Lightbits’ software-defined block storage, designed with NVMe/TCP, offers ultra-low latency, high throughput, and consistent performance using standard Ethernet and commodity hardware. Customers deploying Lightbits reportedly achieve up to 5X greater hardware efficiency compared to legacy SDS solutions like Ceph Storage, leading to reduced infrastructure costs, power consumption, and operational complexity.
“Last year was a clear momentum-change for the business,” Kirzner added. “Customers don’t evaluate storage in isolation—they look at how their choices impact data accessibility, scalability, power consumption, and cost economics across their entire data platform. Lightbits is the only software-defined, NVMe/TCP direct storage for organizations that need predictable performance and elasticity at scale without proprietary hardware lock-in.”
Lightbits is increasingly being deployed as a shared storage foundation for critical workloads such as AI, real-time analytics, high-frequency transactions, and cloud-native platforms. It integrates seamlessly across Kubernetes, KubeVirt, OpenStack, and enterprise Linux environments. Over the past year, Lightbits expanded its ecosystem and product capabilities to optimize modern on-premises cloud environments.
Key advancements include Advanced Management & Integration, with the unveiling of Intelligent Cluster Management and joining the Mirantis Partner Program. For Hardware-Optimized Performance, Lightbits launched a Kubernetes storage solution optimized for AI workloads using AMD technology and NVMe over TCP storage on Supermicro systems. Strategic Ecosystem Alliances were formed, including a partnership with CYBERTEC to enhance large-scale PostgreSQL deployments for financial services and e-commerce sectors. Additionally, Lightbits collaborated with Arctera at KubeCon to demonstrate performance-optimized resilience for Red Hat OpenShift environments.
Lawrence Lam, Vice President of Solutions and Technology at Supermicro, highlighted the collaboration: “By combining Supermicro’s industry-leading server platforms with Lightbits’ block storage software, we’ve enabled our joint customers to achieve the performance and scale required for today’s AI and Kubernetes workloads.” He noted that their joint reference architecture, validating Supermicro’s H14 server series with Lightbits storage, demonstrates measurable gains in I/O performance, latency reduction, and hardware efficiency.
In 2025, Lightbits further solidified its industry position through executive expansion, appointing Sagy Volkov as Field CTO. The company also received recognition, including a Data Breakthrough Award and being named a GigaOm Fast-Moving Leader in the 2025 Primary Storage Report.
Matt Kimball, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, stated: “The massive acceleration in AI and real-time data workloads has proven that legacy storage is no longer just a bottleneck—it can be a barrier to innovation. As organizations move toward full-scale data infrastructure modernization, the shift to flexible, disaggregated software-defined storage has become a strategic necessity. Enterprises now require scalability with predictable performance and cost-efficiency. Lightbits’ native NVMe over TCP architecture directly addresses this shift, positioning the company as a critical enabler of infrastructure modernization.”
Lightbits Labs plans for continued expansion across the Americas, Europe, and other high-growth regions. The company intends to release new products and partnerships later this year, maintaining its focus on delivering fast, cost-efficient block storage for the modern era. Lightbits will showcase its technology at upcoming industry events, including The Red Hat Summit: Connect Zurich, regional STAC Summits, and KubeCon EU.
