SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Malcolm Smith
Software Engineering Manager
Microsoft
Malcolm Smith is a Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft driving block and file storage innovations in Azure Storage. He currently works on Azure Elastic SAN and Azure Disk with a focus on data availability and replication. He previously drove scalability and performance optimizations for Azure Ultra Disk, ReFS, and NTFS.
Related Sessions
Massively Scalable Storage for Stateful Containers on Azure
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. We will reveal technical designs and innovations in the Elastic SAN architecture behind the massive control and data plane scale. In addition, we will use this example to highlight how different SAN solutions can integrate with Azure Container Storage.
