A prominent trend in disaggregated storage is the use of Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabric (NVME-oF) and in particular, NVMe over TCP to connect storage devices over a network. But there is no straightforward to provide this storage to Virtual machines and containers. The hypervisor will still need to emulate virtio-blk or virtio-scsi kind of emulated interfaces to expose this storage which involves usage of hypervisor processor cycles.

The Open Programmable Infrastructure (or OPI) is an open-source effort within the Linux Foundation to develop a standard API for utilizing SmartNICs, DPUs and IPUs, and other coprocessors or processing elements. It will allow users to provision and orchestrate all devices in the same way, thus allowing them to handle many different devices, implement new devices, and change or replace devices without learning a new command structure. It will also allow manufacturers to create a standard API, deliver new or upgraded devices faster, and benefit from a large ecosystem.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) provides a set of tools and libraries for writing high performance, scalable, user-mode storage applications. It's an ideal open source software framework for building IPU/DPU based storage solutions including initiators, targets and local SSD virtualization. This presentation talks about recent SPDK enhancements for IPU/DPU support, how SPDK is used to enable IPU/DPU based storage solutions, and the potential of SPDK to help drive toward standard based IPU/DPU storage solutions.