The case for RAMClouds: scalable high-performance storage entirely in DRAM
John Ousterhout
Parag Agrawal
David Erickson
David Mazières
Subhasish Mitra
Aravind Narayanan
Guru Parulkar
Mendel Rosenblum
Stephen M. Rumble
Eric Stratmann
Ryan Stutsman
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2010
Abstract
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.