Techniques enable offloading operations to be performed closer to where the data is stored in systems with sharded and erasure-coded data, such as in data centers. In one example, a system includes a compute sled or compute node, which includes one or more processors. The system also includes a storage sled or storage node. The storage node includes one or more storage devices. The storage node stores at least one portion of data that is sharded and erasure-coded. Other portions of the data are stored on other storage nodes. The compute node sends a request to offload an operation to the storage node to access the sharded and erasure-coded data. The storage node then sends a request to offload the operation to one or more other storage nodes determined to store one or more codes of the data. The storage nodes perform the operation on the portions of locally stored data and provide the results to the next-level up node.