Large-scale data analytics, machine learning, and big data applications often require the storage of a massive amount of data. For cost-effective high bandwidth, many data centers have used tiered storage with warmer tiers made of flashes or persistent memory modules and cooler tiers provisioned with high-density rotational drives.

Rapidly increasing data sizes, the high cost of data movement, and the advent of fast, NVMe-over-fabric based flash enclosures have led to the exploration of computation near flash for more efficient and economical storage solutions. Ordered key-value stores, commonly developed as software library code that runs inside application processes such as LevelDB and RocksDB, are one of many storage functions that can potentially benefit from offloaded processing.