The memory cloud is looming over the storage market

in recent years, Tcl's founder, academician of the American Academy of Engineering, and ACM fellow John Ousterhout, who taught at Stanford University, studied a huge project ramcloud--memory cloud, a new data center storage system, It consists of thousands of ordinary servers in the main memory of the large-scale system, whenever all information is stored in these fast dram (dynamic random access memory, commonly known as memory), memory replaces the hard disk in the traditional system, and the silver disk is used only as a backup after it is replaced.

The memory cloud not only simplifies the development of large Web applications, but also creates new data-intensive applications. It enables both large-scale (100~1000 TB) and low latency (the same data center application accesses a small amount of memory cloud data with just 5~10ms, 100~1000 times faster than the current system).

The latest edition of ACM Communications (Communications of ACM) published the August 2011 issue of Ousterhout's work with his team to write "The case for Ramcloud"

Over the past 40 years, disk has become the primary storage location for information on the computer system's network.

During this time, disk technology has been significantly improved and leveraged by higher levels of storage systems, such as file systems and relational databases. But disk performance has not changed as much as disk capacity. A reality that cannot be overlooked is that technicians find that disk-based systems are increasingly difficult to scale to meet the needs of large Web applications.

Many computer scientists have proposed new disk-based storage solutions, as well as other recommended replacement disks and flash memory devices. In contrast, the solution we're talking about is the basic idea of migrating online data from disk to DRAM to create a new type of storage on top of the disk.

At this point, a new storage approach called "Ramcloud" will provide a new storage architecture for many future applications.

What is Ramcloud?

The rationale behind the Ramcloud architecture is to store information on all commercial servers on primary storage and create large storage systems using hundreds of thousands of servers. It is said that data stored on Ramcloud is 100-1000 times lower than that stored on a disk-based system, while throughput is 100-1000 times higher.

While individual storage is easy to change, Ramcloud can leverage replication and backup technology to ensure data durability and availability, as is the case with traditional disk-based systems.

Ramcloud can provide low latency and scale, and will change the storage industry's status from the following three points. First, Ramcloud eliminates the scalability problems of developing large-scale web applications. Second, the new application class will be enabled, which will make it possible to drill down 100-1000 times in depth today; Ramcloud clusters can support a single metabolic program or many smaller applications, and can be assured of no additional complexity when small applications are turned into development for large applications.