The case for RAMClouds: scalable high-performance storage entirely in DRAM

  • Authors:

  • John Ousterhout;Parag Agrawal;David Erickson;Christos Kozyrakis;Jacob Leverich;David Mazières;Subhasish Mitra;Aravind Narayanan;Guru Parulkar;Mendel Rosenblum;Stephen M. Rumble;Eric Stratmann;Ryan Stutsman

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
  • Year:
  • 2010

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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.