RAMCloud: Scalable High-Performance Storage Entirely in DRAM

Disk-oriented approaches to online storage are becoming increasingly problematic: they do not scale gracefully to meet the needs of new large-scale Web applications, and improvements in disk capacity have out-stripped improvements in access speed. In this talk I will describe 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. A RAMCloud can provide durable and available storage with 100-1000x the throughput of disk-based systems and 100-1000x lower access latency. By combining low latency and large scale, RAMClouds will enable a new class of applications that manipulate large datasets more intensively than has ever been possible before.