Specialized, transient data services are playing an increasingly prominent role in data-intensive scientific computing. These services offer flexible, on-demand pairing of applications with storage hardware using semantics that are optimized for the problem domain. Concurrent with this trend, upcoming scientific computing and big data systems will be deployed with emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technology to achieve the highest possible price/productivity ratio. Clearly, therefore, we must develop techniques to facilitate the confluence of specialized data services and NVM technology.