Christopher Hertel

Data Processing Units (DPUs) and SmartNICs--these things are getting a lot of attention, particularly in the network storage world. There's a bit of history behind them, particularly if you consider TCP Offload Engine (TOE) cards and iSCSI NICs, both of which have been around for quite a while. This latest wave, however, is more general-purpose by design and presents an opportunity for developers like us.

DPUs are typically, but not necessarily, built around ARM cores. They are the engines that power the current cavalcade of SmartNICs, and are also being integrated into server-class mainboards. In any case, they are going to be a feature of the next generation of storage platforms, application servers, and cloud infrastructure systems. This talk centers around work to implement NAS Offload, particularly SMB3, for SmartNICs. We'll expand from there to discuss how NAS Offload can be leveraged for Software Defined NAS services, and will also consider what DPUs might mean for distributed object storage. The doors are wide open to Open Source development community, and this is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.