Future of Storage Platform Architecture

Traditional Storage Node consists of Compute, Networking and Storage elements. In this case, the entire node is a single failure domain and as such both data and meta data are maintained in storage. Emergence of CXL allows us to re-think the traditional storage node architecture. In future, the storage (behind CXL IO) and metadata memory (behind a CXL memory) can be disaggregated locally or across a bunch of storage nodes to improve the availability of the data. Further, memory persistence can be achieved at a granular level using CXL memory devices. Future extensions to CXL with fabric like attributes have potential to further extend the data replication capabilities of the storage platform. In this talk, we will discuss the various platform architecture options that are emerging for the storage node and how they can change the face of traditional storage node organization.