Tuxera at SC25: introducing the next generation of high-performance file sharing

Tuxera returned to SC25 in St. Louis this November, joining the global high-performance computing community for the industry’s premier conference on computing, networking, storage, and analysis. Building on our previous presence at the event, this year’s focus centered on demonstrating proven Fusion SMB capabilities whilst unveiling the technical preview of Fusion NFS – a development that generated substantial interest from research organizations and HPC professionals throughout the week.

Tuxera Fusion NFS technical preview

At SC25, we launched the technical preview of Fusion NFS, built from the ground up for today’s AI-driven data flows. “We’ve been asked many times why we’re not doing NFS,” explained Duncan Beattie, Tuxera’s Market Development Manager. “We are. Fusion NFS builds on that foundation and has the same sort of features. It’s an interesting story to tell because in some environments, such as MLPerf, Fusion SMB is twice as fast as NFSD. What we’re planning to do and what we are doing is we’ve now got Fusion NFS where we have NFSD performance in user mode.”

▶ Watch the full interview with Duncan at SC25

Fusion NFS extends the same performance benefits that have made Fusion SMB the world’s most advanced SMB server for Linux to NFS environments, delivering on five key fundamentals: scalability to handle growing datasets, RDMA support for ultra-low latency access, rolling upgrades that eliminate downtime, multi-protocol capabilities with SMB through shared locks, and all running in user mode for simplified deployment and management.

The technical advantages address challenges that have frustrated HPC environments for years. As Ned Pyle, Tuxera’s Enterprise Storage Technical Officer and former Microsoft SMB Protocol Architect, explains: “The reason that you’d be using Fusion NFS instead of Ganesha or NFSD really comes down to a couple of reasons. You need safety and security. That means running in user mode. It means being able to run in a container. But you need performance, and kernel is where performance typically comes from. The beauty of Fusion NFS is like Ganesha, you’re in user mode, but unlike Ganesha, you’re using RDMA, you are using scale-out performance across multiple nodes. You are able to get 2,223 GB/Sec off of a 200-gigabit network port, all while using us together with Fusion SMB to create a multi-protocol story with shared locks that handles security.”

▶ Watch the full interview with Ned at SC25

IBM Storage Scale User Group

Sunday’s IBM Storage Scale User Group session provided an excellent platform to demonstrate how Tuxera Fusion SMB integrates with IBM’s distributed file system environments. Speaking alongside NVIDIA and other partners, our team showcased how Fusion’s multi-threaded architecture enables organizations to maximize the performance potential of Storage Scale deployments. We also previewed Fusion NFS, emphasizing how these same five fundamentals – scalability, RDMA, rolling upgrades, multi-protocol support with SMB, and user mode operation – will benefit Storage Scale environments running NFS workloads.

The session attracted Storage Scale integrators and users managing some of the world’s most demanding computing environments, from medical research institutions to climate modelling facilities. Throughout the conference, Storage Scale users expressed strong interest in how Fusion’s architecture complements their existing infrastructure investments, delivering breakthrough performance without requiring wholesale system replacements.

Customer-driven development

The consistent theme throughout customer conversations revealed why Tuxera invested in developing Fusion NFS. As CTO Antti Alila explained: “It’s quite interesting where as we have been having the world’s fastest SMB server for years now and we have been engaging with many different customers, nearly every time when we do the engagement and we start moving forward with the integration for the customer, the question comes up: how about NFS? You need to have cross-protocol and you need to have multi-protocol server and then you need to have the same performance features like SMB.”

 ▶ Watch the full interview with Antti at SC25

By delivering both exceptional SMB and NFS implementations from the same foundational architecture, Tuxera addresses this persistent pain point. Teams can standardize on infrastructure that delivers consistent, breakthrough performance regardless of protocol choice, with shared locks ensuring data integrity across different access methods whilst

the user-mode architecture provides deployment flexibility that kernel-based alternatives simply cannot match.

This customer-driven approach ensures development resources focus on solving genuine infrastructure challenges. Partners like Data In Science Technologies demonstrate how Fusion technology integrates into real-world HPC deployments, transforming data handling for research organizations managing complex, data-intensive workloads. The enthusiastic response at SC25 validated this approach, with research organizations expressing strong interest in the technology.

Team perspectives

For team members who joined Tuxera recently, SC25 showcased the enthusiastic reception Fusion technology receives within the HPC community. Marc Perez, who joined approximately 45 days before the conference, reflected: “This is my first SC conference and I have to say it’s been amazing, not just from the overall energy of the show, but the energy we’re hearing from our customers. They are beyond excited about what we do for the SMB. We are best in class.”

 ▶ Watch the full interview with Marc at SC25

The future is bright

VP of Enterprise Solutions Antti Alila captured the broader significance: “High-performance computing continues to accelerate at an astonishing pace. The feedback on our RDMA-enabled, scale-out architecture and our latest MLPerf results was outstanding. It’s clear that modern workloads need modern I/O paths and we’re excited to be part of that future.”

The future looked bright at SC25 – literally. Our team and partners sporting Tuxera sunglasses became a recognizable presence on the show floor, a playful nod to the optimism surrounding infrastructure innovation in the HPC community.

SC25 confirmed that the HPC community recognizes infrastructure performance as critical to breakthrough science. The interest in both Fusion SMB’s proven capabilities and Fusion NFS’s emerging potential reflects genuine urgency around eliminating infrastructure bottlenecks.

Find out more about Tuxera Fusion SMB and how it can transform your high-performance computing infrastructure.