High-performance computing data centers supporting large-scale simulation applications can routinely generate a large amount of data. To minimize time-to-result, it is crucial that this data be promptly absorbed, processed, and potentially even multidimensionally indexed so that it can be efficiently retrieved when the scientists need it for insights.

SSDs that support Zoned Namespace (ZNS) are increasingly popular for large-scale storage deployments due to their cost efficiency and performance improvements over conventional SSDs, which include 3-4x throughput increase, prolonged SSD lifetime, as well as making QLC media available to I/O heavy workloads. As the zoned storage hardware ecosystem has matured, its open-source software ecosystem has also grown. As a result, we are now emerging at a new stage that provides a solid foundation for large-scale cloud adoption.

The Windows Protocol Test Suites is an open source, cross platform application designed to enable the testing of implementations of selected Windows protocols. It is used both internally at Microsoft to ensure that protocol behaviors are in line with the publicly available protocol specifications, and by protocol implementers to test their own protocol behaviors. In this talk, we'll provide a deep dive into the architecture and design of the Test Suites, discussing some of the design decisions.

This abstract explores the integration of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) on the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter, a specialized network interface card optimized for RDMA workloads in Azure environments. It discusses the advantages of RDMA technology, including reduced latency, improved throughput, and lower CPU utilization. The abstract highlights the configuration options and network protocols supported by the adapter, such as InfiniBand and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE).

CXL has garnered increasing attention from the industry, with a predominant focus on memory expanders utilizing DRAM-based technology. However, the discontinuation of Optane and the growing demand for extensive memory in new ML models have prompted the storage and system communities to urgently seek alternative solutions. In a keynote address last year, Dr. Ki presented compelling reasons for the storage community to seriously consider CXL adoption.

Computational storage is a new paradigm in computing where data processing is moved closer to the storage device to enhance performance and reduce data transfer bottlenecks. In this presentation, we showcase how data integrity checks on CSDs with a software toolkit and a dedicated hardware to process the host payload can significantly improve storage performance and reduce data transfer overhead. This is a cross-industry effort that includes the system, the system software, and the CSD representing a complete end-to-end solution.

Azure Container Storage is a container native, microservices-based storage service providing unified volume management across different cloud storage backends, enabling consistency and portability. Azure Elastic SAN, which is one such backend, is a purpose-built, highly available block storage solution designed to scale to millions of IOPS at low ms latency. In this talk, we will deep dive into how Azure Container Storage uses Azure Elastic SAN to provide elastic bursting of stateful pods for large scale data processing at low cost.

The Open Programmable Infrastructure (or OPI) is an open-source effort within the Linux Foundation to develop a standard API for utilizing SmartNICs, DPUs and IPUs, and other coprocessors or processing elements. It will allow users to provision and orchestrate all devices in the same way, thus allowing them to handle many different devices, implement new devices, and change or replace devices without learning a new command structure. It will also allow manufacturers to create a standard API, deliver new or upgraded devices faster, and benefit from a large ecosystem.

The long-term retention and backup requirements of many organizations continue to grow as their data estate grows. The long-term preservation market provides an opportunity for a higher durability service to store copies of high value digital assets in as many places, with as many types of media as possible, to eliminate the chance of data loss. The ability to store large volumes of such “long-term preservation” data, largely depends on enabling storage technologies that are lowest cost than any storage technology that exists today, such that cost to store data is near zero.

A prominent trend in disaggregated storage is the use of Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabric (NVME-oF) and in particular, NVMe over TCP to connect storage devices over a network. But there is no straightforward to provide this storage to Virtual machines and containers. The hypervisor will still need to emulate virtio-blk or virtio-scsi kind of emulated interfaces to expose this storage which involves usage of hypervisor processor cycles.