Lee Prewitt

Overview

Lee Prewitt is a Microsoft storage architect who frames the hyperscaler live-migration problem that motivates NVMe virtual-SSD standardization. At the 2025 OCP Global Summit he set up the business case for seamless VM live migration before Mike Allison covered the NVMe standardization details. Prewitt grounds the need in a concrete reliability target: Azure tracks customer VM disruptions with a metric it calls the Annual Interruption Rate (AIR), and keeping AIR low across device failures, predictive failures, node maintenance, and load balancing requires live migration because "hardware is not perfect."

Prewitt also articulates the architectural direction: driving toward a minimal hypervisor by getting the hypervisor out of the IO path and out of admin-queue trapping, which both recovers performance lost to paravirtualization and minimizes the attack surface that bad actors could exploit.