An Architecture for Memory Centric Active Storage (MCAS)

Abstract: The advent of CPU-attached persistent memory technology, such as Intel's Optane Persistent Memory Modules (PMM), has brought with it new opportunities for storage. In 2018, IBM Research Almaden began investigating and developing a new enterprise-grade storage solution directly aimed at this emerging technology. MCAS (Memory Centric Active Storage) defines an evolved network-attached key-value store that offers both near-data compute and the ability to layer enterprise-grade data management services on shared persistent memory. As a converged memory-storage tier, MCAS moves towards eliminating the traditional separation of compute and storage, and thereby unifying the data space. This paper provides an in-depth review of the MCAS architecture and implementation, as well as general performance results.