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RAMCloud is a new class of storage for large-scale datacenter applications. It is a key-value store that keeps all data in DRAM at all times (it is not a cache like memcached). Furthermore, it takes advantage of high-speed networking such as Infiniband or 10Gb Ethernet to provide very high performance. Applications running in the same datacenter as a RAMCloud cluster can access small objects in about 5μs, which is1000x faster than disk-based storage systems. Small writes take about 15μs. At the same time, RAMCloud storage is durable: data is automatically replicated on nonvolatile secondary storage such as disk or flash, so it is not lost when servers crash. One of RAMCloud's unique features is that it recovers very quickly from server crashes (only 1-2 seconds) so the availability gaps after crashes are almost unnoticeable. Finally, RAMCloud is designed to scale: it can support clusters containing thousands of storage servers, with total capacities up to a few petabytes.
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