Storage system having an in-line hardware accelerator

A storage system comprising an in-line hardware accelerator, a plurality of solid-state drive (SSD) units, a volatile memory module, a non-volatile memory module, a central processing unit (CPU) directly coupled to the volatile memory and to the non-volatile memory, and an accelerator memory module that is coupled to the in-line hardware accelerator or belongs to the in-line hardware accelerator;

• wherein the in-line hardware accelerator is directly coupled to the plurality of SSD units;
• wherein the in-line hardware accelerator is coupled to at least one of the volatile memory and the non-volatile memory;
• and wherein the in-line hardware accelerator is configured to:
• retrieve, by a data movement engine, data stored in the coupled one or more of the volatile memory module and the non-volatile memory module into a processing memory space of an in-line hardware accelerator, without involving the CPU;
• execute, by at least one acceleration engine, at least one acceleration process selected from a group consisting of:
• compression, decompression, encryption, decryption, compaction, de-duplication, replication, peer-to-peer data transfer, a scatter-gather process and a virtual MMU process;
• copy the data from the processing memory space to a write space of the in-line hardware accelerator;
• during the copy process, calculate and store erasure coding information of the copied data;
• and
• write the processed data from the accelerator write space directly into the plurality of SSD units.