STH is at the Microsoft Keynote from OCP Summit 2019. For some background, you can see our coverage of previous OCP announcements: Mellanox Spectrum for Microsoft Azure SONiC at OCP Summit 2018 and Microsoft at Open Compute Summit 2017: AI and ARM64 with Cavium and Qualcomm. Microsoft kicked off the OCP 2019 keynotes with updates on existing products as well as a new compression ecosystem called Zipline.
Cerberus and Denali Update
Microsoft started its keynote saying that project Cerberus, its hardware root of trust for infrastructure project is expanding to touch more hardware. Moving from the BMC and motherboard and into components like GPUs.
On the Denali side, you can read background from last year’s summit here Microsoft Project Denali a Game Changer for Flash Storage at Scale. Microsoft showed off EDSFF prototype Denali SSDs. We were told that this is only a prototype, not a production SSD. On the other hand, we are now seeing an innovative SSD design based on the EDSFF standard. That is showing concrete product development in this space. We hope to hear more about this cloud scale flash standard soon.
Project Zipline
Project Zipline is a new compression standard that Microsoft is open sourcing. The goal of the compression algorithm is to compress both legacy datasets such as system logs as well as what Microsoft calls “modern datasets” such as IoT telemetry data.
Project Zipline is billed as a full solution stack implementation including algorithms, software, and hardware. Project zipline will offer always-on data processing with high compression ratios, high throughput, and low latency.
Project Zipline will be open sourced. That includes the algorithm, plus the RTL for hardware vendors to adopt. Most major CPU, networking, and storage vendors are supporting the new compression standard.
I will apologize for the side view of the slide. I am sitting near the stage in the center of the keynote and slides are being shown only on the side screens.
We are going to cover more of the interesting announcements over the day.
