Recap of MSST Conference 2025

The Massive Storage Systems and Technology conference, aka MSST, edition 2025, was a bit special. It took place at its classic location, at the Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering but 2 things made it pretty unique. First by the dates in September instead of May or June in the past, and second because it was really centered on NFS and distributed/network file storage. And for a good reason, it is the 40th birthday of NFS if you consider NFS unveiled in 1985 by SUN.Several companies participated to this week with all deep content avoiding commercial messaging. The agenda lists by alpha order Backblaze, DDN, Hammerspace, JRLabs, LANL, Leil Storage, META, Micron, MinIO, PeakAIO, Pure Storage, Samsung, Seagate, Versity, Xinnor and Zilliz.

We had the pleasure to listen to several key people involved in the nascent and development of NFS. Tom Lyon, Sun employee #8, Brian Pawlowski aka BeePee, Trond Myklebust and even Garth Gibson and David Hitz, co-founder of NetApp and early employee at Auspex, were present in a real fellowship atmosphere as MSST is unique for that. Tom Lyon insisted on the genesis of NFS, why Sun introduced this approach with some up and downs, in the context of early 80’s where machines’ resources and OS were very different. The idea to offer a file sharing service natively integrated within the OS, even not Unix-based one, was obviously the start of an incredible trajectory. NFS v3 and v4, .x iterations, are of course still here with millions of configurations everywhere for tons of usages. BeePee spent time on the mature part of NFS with details on many key features and developments over the years. One of this being pNFS, introduced with NFSv4.1 in 2010, 15 years ago. The concept of splitting metadata and data traffic with distinct services even running in dedicated systems was born with the NFS spirit. And by NFS we mean the open standard approach fundamental for the adoption from end-users communities and vendors. But who really adopted, developed and offered pNFS since 2010? We all remember Panasas, now Vdura, and Garth Gibson was with us in Santa Clara this week – he recently “rejoined” Vdura as CTO -, we saw Tonian Systems, acquired in 2013 by David Flynn under the Primary Data umbrella that finally morphed into Hammerspace a few years later. Of course we had Red Hat, CohortFS, acquired by Red Hat in 2015. The various file server vendors, even specialists, didn’t really promote and offer pNFS based solution until recent times as AI really shook the domain. 15 years later, we count several offerings, various reference architectures, among them Hammerspace, NetApp, PeakAIO, Pure Storage with FlashBlade//EXA, and even Dell working on Project Lightning. We can even expect more metadata implementations and designs to enrich pNFS from NFS-based file server players, we’ll see. Therefore, there is a real dynamism now behind pNFS with new ideas and features iterations. Of course proprietary, commercial and open source parallel file storage continue to be very active, validated by HPC push and more recently also by AI again. No doubt this parallel file storage domain lives probably its best moment since AI requires fast IOs and tons of them.

The other part of the conference offered the opportunity to discover some companies for some people in the audience, go deeper in some approaches and designs.

• Xinnor presented a very interesting content about NFS optimization and all the work and tests they made recently on the storage software stack with thier xiRAID layer, XFS and NFSoRDMA among other things like LOCALIO NFS attribute, nConnect or Mutlipathing options.

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• Hammerspace spent time on FlexFiles and obviously on LOCALIO as well being one of the ambassador of this feature.

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• Leil Storage introduced for some people in the audience SaunaFS, where it comes from and the solution they develop around it being an innovative secondary storage solution.

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• PeakAIO developed its open pNFS model with some HA extensions but also striping and other advanced features.

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• Pure Storage spent time on the FpNFS Flexfile layout and the striping flavor and the return of experience on its implementation.

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Micron gave a session about FAMFS we already covered following SC24, very interesting model that can be coupled with pNFS.

Gary Grider, LANL, explained in detail GUFI – Grand Unified File Index – and why it is a must at scale as classic or default system oriented file listing tools don’t and can’t work for very large configurations.

Object Storage was also present and has been covered by several sessions. Among them, DDN, MinIO, Spectra Logic and Versity with the first two really insisted on S3 performance to sustain AI workloads requirements, respectively with Infinia and AIStor. Versity explained in details S3 compatibility and its gateway model as a front-end of Versity ScoutFS for deep and large data archiving configurations.

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Solidigm had a final session about Flash of course covering what they call the Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL), Samsung insisted on MLPerf and some automation tools with Kdevops and VectorDB. Backblaze promoted its frequent reliability study, always a good source of information with real life and experience behind.

Seagate moment was about HAMR with many details on the roadmap confirming that hyperscalers buying criteria is TCO and $/TB that is well addressed by WDC and Seagate with recent solid financial results.

More deep in the data flow and storage tier, Spectra Logic covered LTO-10 and tape developments plus some of their options to offer remote access to tape libraries.

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META was also invited and we understand their approach to flash storage essentially with QLC based products with a real push of OCP standards. We learned why they love E.2 form factors and capacity SSDs, no real surprise finally…

According to organizers MSST will be back before the summer in 2026 probably the week of June 15, confirmation in a few months.