Hazel: Secure and Efficient Disaggregated Storage for Data Centers

Marcin Chrapek et al. have published a new systems paper announcing Hazel, a secure storage management system for disaggregated NVMe-oF deployments (arXiv v2, revised 10 Feb 2026).

• Main announcement: Hazel extends NVMe-oF to meet the confidential computing (CC) threat model, providing confidentiality, integrity, and freshness guarantees; introduces novel control-path concept “counter-leasing”, a disaggregated Hazel Merkle Tree (HMT) for data-path integrity, and supports offload to CC-capable smart NIC accelerators. The authors prototype Hazel on an NVIDIA BlueField-3 and report as little as 1–2% performance degradation on workloads including AI training, IO500, and YCSB.
• Background and details: The paper is a formal research release on arXiv (arXiv:2510.18756, v2, revised 10 Feb 2026); it remains compatible with NVMe-oF and leverages NVMe metadata; the submission history shows initial submission 21 Oct 2025 and revision 10 Feb 2026. No monetary amounts or deployment timelines are specified in the text.