Non-volatile Random Access Memory (NVR) on a storage system may be dynamically converted between use as temporary memory in a memory context and use as persistent memory in a storage context. NVR (e.g., embodied as DIMM) may be utilized in a hybrid capacity, where some of the NVR is used as memory and some of the NVR is used as storage, and where NVR memory is converted to memory as needed, dynamically as I/O is being processed using the NVR. A host system may be directly connected to an internal switching fabric of the data storage system without an intervening component of the storage system (e.g., a director) controlling access of the host system to the internal fabric or to the memory. The host system may provision and use the NVR as storage by directly communicating with the NVR over the internal fabric, for example, using RDMA.