Local disk emulation using domain-specific hardware poses a great opportunity for innovation in the storage domain. Standard host-side drivers like NVMe or virtio-blk and legacy applications can be enabled to access disaggregated storage at scale using state-of-art protocols like NVMe-oTCP while increasing performance through offload of storage services to the hardware (SmartNIC/DPU/IPU/xPU).

Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) is revolutionizing the networked storage paradigm for cloud service providers (CSPs). The type of device enhances system architecture by exposing NVMe PCI devices to the host and offloading network storage tasks onto the IPU. The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) Acceleration Framework is perfectly suited to operate on these devices, capitalizing on their hardware offloading capabilities for efficient data movement and transformation.