| CPC G06F 3/0655 (2013.01) [G06F 3/0604 (2013.01); G06F 3/067 (2013.01)] | 20 Claims |

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1. A method implemented in a distributed environment including one or more compute servers in a first rack and one or more storage servers or storage arrays in a second rack, comprising:
receiving, at a first switch, a storage access request originating from a compute server to access a logical storage unit residing on a target storage device in a storage server or storage array;
determining, at the first switch, the target storage device; and
forwarding the storage access request via a forwarding path traversing the first switch to the target storage device;
wherein:
the first switch comprises a processor to execute software that is to receive write data from an application associated with the compute server;
execution of the software by the processor is to result in distributed replicating of the data in the one or more storage servers or storage arrays; and
the first switch also comprises programmable hardware to detect failure of the target storage device and to notify the software of the failure.
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