Whitepaper: Diskless Architecture for Modern Data Centers – Challenges, Design, and Industry Practices

The "Diskless Architecture Whitepaper" systematically reviews the background and challenges of data‑center architecture transformation and proposes a new model called Diskless architecture.

It explains how the historical shift from tightly coupled mainframes to layered storage solutions has led to the need for higher capacity utilization, storage efficiency, compute efficiency, reliability, and performance, driven by emerging hardware such as high‑performance disk frames, DPUs, RDMA, and CXL.

Diskless architecture consists of three layers—storage modules, compute modules, and network modules—forming a pool of resources that enables ultra‑dense storage, remote‑disk pooling, and dis‑kless servers, while breaking the traditional CPU‑centric processing model.

Key technical pillars include:

Scenario‑driven data reduction: variable‑length similarity deduplication and compression algorithms improve storage density for specific workloads such as genomics or data protection.

Storage‑compute separation: IO‑direct‑through technologies (e.g., smart NICs, DPUs) bypass the CPU, reducing latency and increasing throughput.

Disk‑chip collaboration: deep integration of media and controller chips achieves optimal TCO, higher efficiency, and lower power consumption.

High‑throughput networking: flexible use of CXL Fabric, NoF, IP, and RoCE enables both direct‑connect and pooled network modes for massive inter‑server communication.

Network‑storage collaboration: smart NICs and DPUs offload networking, virtualization, encryption, and storage‑layer EC/compression, shortening IO response time and reducing overall system cost.

Industry practice shows three main vendor categories:

Disk‑frame vendors provide direct‑through EBOF/JBOF solutions with millions of IOPS (e.g., Western Digital OpenFlex Data24).

System vendors integrate software‑hardware stacks, offering data reduction, EC, and NFS capabilities on top of high‑performance fabric (e.g., Huawei Micro‑Storage).

NIC vendors build DPU‑centric ecosystems that offload compute and storage functions, with products such as NVIDIA BlueField and China‑Tech KPU.

Market forecasts predict a near‑60% annual growth in demand for flexible, pooled data‑center architectures, reaching $3.4 billion in 2023, indicating that Diskless architecture will become a dominant trend for efficient, scalable data centers.