An improved data storage system and apparatus, including an improved storage controller, is disclosed that enables the acceleration of datacenter software, by making it easier to deploy application software portions (applets) onto storage devices, in a manner that best supports runtime performance acceleration of storage-network-latency-throttled applications. Means are defined for how server hosted applications cause to have provisioned, initiate execution of, and work with a multitude of applets on a multitude of storage devices, proximate to storage contents. This invention supports the multi-exabyte growth of data storage, by scaling performance acceleration linearly with the growth in the number of storage devices. This in turn supports the evolving cloud and Enterprise Cognitive Computing datacenter by providing the infrastructure necessary for accelerating applications that face enormous heterogeneous datasets. This includes Big Data Analytics of problems that have eluded successful analysis.