Fueling blockchain innovation with enhanced storage performance

Based in Seoul, Korea, Lambda256 offers a wide range of solutions and services to support blockchain deployments all over the world. The company has secured Series A and B funding, with a total accumulated investment of more than $80 million.

Headquartered in Seoul, Korea, Lambda256 is on a mission to commercialize blockchain technology. One of the company’s key offerings is Nodit, a cloud-based blockchain infrastructure platform that enhances the efficiency of blockchain network setup, node operation, and data processing for 34 networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, XRPL, Solana, and Aptos.

Mr. Oh Jaehoon, Director at Lambda256, elaborates: “Our unique node infrastructure enables anyone—from individuals to enterprises—to quickly and easily build blockchain applications at any scale. With our industry partners, we’re helping to promote and accelerate blockchain adoption worldwide.”

Supporting a vast blockchain infrastructure places massive storage demands on Lambda256. For many years, the company relied on a hyperscaler platform to deliver storage for its blockchain node and data services. However, as transactions and blocks grew, the cloud approach was becoming increasingly complex and costly.

Mr. Oh Jaehoon continues: “Because of the way our hyperscaler was architected, we needed to replicate the same blockchain data across at least four nodes to achieve high availability. We have a massive volume of data—nearly a petabyte today—which meant that our hyperscaler costs were rising rapidly.”

Storing blockchain data in the cloud created additional challenges for Lambda256. Certain blockchains required cloud storage with extremely high IOPS performance, driving operational costs higher still. The cloud approach also made it difficult to quickly provision new nodes and to restore corrupted ones. In some cases, the process took up to four days—significantly reducing Lambda256’s responsiveness and agility.

“The complexity of managing ever-growing blockchain data, rising cloud storage costs, and slow provisioning and recovery convinced us that we should move our core node services on premises,” comments Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “We looked for a partner with the technology and expertise to support the next stage of our business growth journey.”

Lambda256’s key criteria included a cost-efficient storage architecture that was tailored to the unique performance and availability requirements of blockchain nodes.

“We targeted a solution with over a million IOPS of storage performance,” confirms Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “Reliability and data resilience were also important considerations, as we need to deliver always-on blockchain services to our users.”

After an in-depth review of the storage market, Lambda256 engaged Pure Storage to build its new on-premises platform. The solution is based on Evergreen//One—a consumption-based storage-as-a-service platform that combines on-premises and public-cloud storage resources in a cost-effective and easy-to-manage subscription.

“We considered a traditional CAPEX purchase, but we were worried about tying up capital in a solution that might not have met our business requirements,” explains Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “The beauty of Evergreen//One is that there’s no need for costly up-front investment. For a single monthly fee, we get on-premises appliances backed by rigorous service-level agreements from Pure Storage—including rapid provisioning and data recovery.”

Evergreen//One was also attractive from a performance perspective. While other vendors that Lambda256 evaluated typically offer around 200,000 IOPS per volume, Pure Storage provides up to 700,000.

“Blockchains like Solana demand a minimum of 300,000 IOPS per volume,” adds Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “Pure Storage delivered the highest write IOPS of all the vendors we looked at—peaking at 1.3M IOPS and running consistently at 1.2M IOPS.”

Lambda256 relies on a containerized architecture built on persistent volumes (PVs) in Kubernetes. By combining Evergreen//One and Portworx by Pure Storage, the company can use the native Container Storage Interface framework in Kubernetes to seamlessly utilize the new on-premises resources.

“The Pure Storage team’s expertise was invaluable, especially when it came to using Portworx to integrate Evergreen//One with our Kubernetes PVs,” says Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “The Pure Storage engineers supported us onsite and guided us every step of the way—helping us to achieve our reliability and performance goals.”

Following a stepwise approach, Lambda256 migrated its data to the new Evergreen//One solution. Today, the company has three Evergreen//One licenses, with a solution that provides 1.2M IOPS and a total storage capacity of 1PB.

Through its partnership with Pure Storage, Lambda256 has transitioned to a hybrid-cloud approach. Operational data such as membership information continues to reside in the cloud, but core node services now run on Evergreen//One, with redundancy and load balancing to help ensure uninterrupted access.

Mr. Oh Jaehoon states: “Choosing a subscription-based storage solution has been a game changer for Lambda256. Even though we had no prior experience operating large-scale storage systems in an on-premises environment, we never need to worry about capacity planning or data management. Pure Storage handles everything for us, which allows us to stay focused on blockchain development.”

With Evergreen//One, Lambda256 has a flexible solution that can grow with its business. Pure Storage has already performed a series of nondisruptive controller upgrades for Lambda256, enabling it to boost performance and capacity as its blockchain services continue to expand and evolve.

“Other vendors we looked at required heavy up-front investment and provided little flexibility when it came to scaling up and out,” comments Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “Pure Storage couldn’t be more different. The team has already upgraded our Evergreen//One storage controllers three times seamlessly.”

By adopting a hybrid-cloud architecture with Pure Storage, Lambda256 can ensure that storage costs never become a blocker to business expansion.

“When we engaged Pure Storage, our future storage needs were difficult to predict,” says Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “With Evergreen//One, we get cloud-like pricing at a fraction of the cost of a hyperscaler, which means we’re free to grow without worrying about our spend spiraling out of control. We’ve improved storage efficiency by a factor of four while doubling our physical storage capacity—giving us the headroom for ongoing data growth.”

As global demand for blockchain intensifies, Lambda256 is ready to serve new customers with rock-solid blockchain node and data services.

“Now that we’ve worked closely with Pure Storage, I can understand why the company has earned some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry,” says Mr. Oh Jaehoon. “We have several new projects underway with Pure Storage, including reliability enhancements for our blockchain service operations and improvements to our data management capabilities.”

He concludes: “We have an aggressive growth strategy, which means business appetite for storage is only going to increase in the years ahead. In Pure Storage, we have the ideal partner to deliver the scalable, reliable storage we need to power blockchain innovation.”