What is meant by separating compute from storage? This keeps being mentioned as if it were some new paradigm shift so I assume there's a non-obvious situation.
When people talk about separating compute from storage, they mean pulling compute heavy tasks like query, ingest, indexing, and compaction apart and using a shared storage tier that many systems can talk to. Usually this is object storage paired with some sort of catalog (kept in either object storage or some other store or API).
Snowflake popularized this approach in the data warehousing and OLAP space with great success. Their papers submitted to VLDB are great reads on the topoic.