Intel's DAOS 2.4 Storage Engine Released

While Intel divested its storage business and Intel Optane was sadly discontinued, one of the interesting open-source software projects from its storage efforts has been DAOS, the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage engine. Version 2.4 of the DAOS software-defined object store designed for high-speed storage was released this past week.

DAOS 2.4 stabilizes its support for UCX support on InfiniBand fabrics, Slingshot fabrics are now supported, a technology preview level feature of metadata-on-SSD support, support for multiple SCM namespaces per CPU socket when used on servers with Intel Optane persistent memory, EC parity rotation is now used for erasure coding, multi-user DFUSE support, and various other changes.

Those interested in more of the changes to find with the DAOS 2.4 storage engine release will enjoy reading the release notes for this open-source project update. Those wanting to build DAOS 2.4 from source can find the new release up on GitHub.

Per the project's roadmap, DAOS 2.4 was originally supposed to be out in H1'2023 with DAOS 2.6 in H2'2023. The next DAOS release is expected to stabilize OmniPath Express support, expand non-persistent memory support, checksum scrubbing, Intel VMD hot-plug support, and bring other new features. Meanwhile with the DAOS 3.0 major release next year there are plans for multi-homed network support, DAOS storage tiering, Lustre integration, catastrophic recovery support, and other additions. Further out they are looking at CXL SSD support, inline compression and encryption via Intel QAT, and other features.