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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.
Ousterhout et al. (Wed,) studied this question.