The case for RAMCloud

Disk-oriented approaches to online storage are becoming increasingly problematic: they do not scale gracefully to meet the needs of large-scale Web applications, and improvements in disk capacity have far outstripped improvements in access latency and bandwidth. This paper argues for a new approach to datacenter storage called RAMCloud, where information is kept entirely in DRAM and large-scale systems are created by aggregating the main memories of thousands of commodity servers. We believe that RAMClouds can provide durable and available storage with 100-1000x the throughput of disk-based systems and 100-1000x lower access latency. The combination of low latency and large scale will enable a new breed of dataintensive applications.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CACM
• Authors: John K. Ousterhout, Parag Agrawal, David Erickson, Christos Kozyrakis, Jacob Leverich, David Mazières, Subhasish Mitra, Aravind Narayanan, Diego Ongaro, Guru M. Parulkar, Mendel Rosenblum, Stephen M. Rumble, Eric Stratmann, Ryan Stutsman
• Keywords: CACM 2011, Commodity Servers, Oriented Approaches, Scale Web, Software Engineering