Exemplary embodiments provide a disaggregated memory appliance, comprising: a plurality of leaf memory switches that manage one or more memory channels of one or more of leaf memory modules; a low-latency memory switch that arbitrarily connects one or more external processors to the plurality of leaf memory modules over a host link; and a low-latency routing protocol used by both the low-latency memory switch and the leaf memory switches that encapsulates memory technology specific semantics by use of tags that uniquely identify specific types of memory technology used in the memory appliance during provisioning, monitoring and operation.