2024 has been a transformative year for the DAOS Foundation. As the DAOS project celebrates another year of innovation, it’s important to reflect on our major accomplishments and look forward to the opportunities 2025 holds.
A New Chapter with the Linux Foundation
One of the most significant milestones for the DAOS Foundation in 2024 was completing the first full year of its integration into the Linux Foundation. This strategic move allowed DAOS to benefit from the extensive support, governance, and collaborative resources that come with being a part of one of the world’s leading open source organizations. Joining the Linux Foundation marks a new era of growth for the project, further solidifying DAOS as a crucial component in the open source storage ecosystem.
Founding Companies and New Partnerships – 2024 Highlights
DAOS’ success in 2024 would not have been possible without the continued support and contributions of its founding member companies:
- Argonne National Laboratory
- Google Cloud
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
- Intel
These organizations have been pivotal in shaping the development, adoption, and long-term sustainability of DAOS. Their dedication has allowed the project to scale across multiple sectors, enabling high-performance, scalable storage solutions for enterprises and research institutions alike.
In 2024, we proudly welcomed VDURA as a new premier member to the community. A leading innovator in data infrastructure, AI, and high-performance computing, VDURA brings deep expertise and will play an important role in enhancing DAOS’ capabilities and collaboration going forward.
Also in 2024, Google Cloud launched Parallelstore, the first fully managed storage service in the cloud based on DAOS. In only a few months, Parallelstore has become instrumental to accelerating AI/ML and HPC workloads for Google Cloud customers. Google Cloud’s focus on productionizing DAOS in the cloud and commitment to open source is benefiting the entire DAOS community
The shift of key DAOS contributors and leadership from Intel to HPE reflects the collaborative and evolving nature of the project as it continues to gain traction in the enterprise space. HPE’s expertise in server and storage solutions will propel DAOS further into HPC and technical computing markets.
DAOS 2.6 Release: A Major Milestone
The release of DAOS 2.6 represents a major milestone which brought several new features and enhancements, including:
- Flash-only support: Enabling DAOS to operate without byte-addressable persistent memory so any computer with NVMe SSDs can use DAOS.
- Enhanced Scalability: With DAOS deployed on Aurora and various customer sites, several improvements have been made to enhance scalability and system robustness.
- Cloud Environment Optimization: The implementation of the delay rebuild feature has significantly increased DAOS’s efficiency and cost-effectiveness in cloud environments, enabling rapid provisioning of new storage instances to replace failed ones.
- Simplified Integration and Performance Boost: The pil4dfs interception library has enabled high metadata IOPS performance without requiring any changes to existing applications, streamlining integration and optimizing performance.
- Catastrophic Recovery: The initial version of the distributed consistency checker has been released, enabling recovery of broken DAOS systems to ensure system integrity.
Looking Ahead to 2025
The momentum achieved in 2024 set a strong foundation for the new year and 2025 promises to be filled with exciting developments and activities. Key highlights planned for the coming year include:
- Robust Roadmap: The roadmap for 2025 expands the platform’s integration with next-generation AI, ML, and data analytics workloads. Support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments is a major theme, with new features planned for enabling seamless data movement across heterogeneous storage systems. Additional performance optimizations, with improved usability, availability, and serviceability, are key initiatives for the coming year.
- New Releases: The DAOS 3.0 release is targeted for release in second half-2025, with several groundbreaking features including non-PMem support (phase 2), distributed consistency checker (CR), fault domains beyond servers and incremental rebuild/integration, making DAOS an even more versatile storage solution for modern applications.
- Expanded Community Events: Building on the success of the DAOS User Group meetings and workshops in 2024, plans are to participate in and host more events in 2025 such as technical deep dives, developer conferences, and major industry events, inviting even more community engagement. Check back to our events page to stay updated as events are added.
- Growing Partnerships: 2025 will focus on growing partnerships with more enterprises, research institutions, and cloud providers. These collaborations will help drive the adoption of DAOS across a broader range of industries, from healthcare to financial services to scientific research.
In conclusion, the DAOS Foundation’s first year as a Linux Foundation project has been a tremendous success, marked by new collaborations, a major software release, and the steady expansion of its user base. As the Foundation looks ahead to 2025, there is great optimism that the coming year will bring even more growth, innovation, and community engagement. We look forward to continuing this exciting journey with all of our partners and contributors.
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