Strawman
Comparision of different data stores:
http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distributed-key-value-stores/
http://opensource.plurk.com/LightCloud/
http://randomfoo.net/2009/04/20/some-notes-on-distributed-key-stores
Redis
What about durability and consistency during snapshotting?
Is it even snapshotting?
If so what does it do about writes while the memory is locked?
Shard hash table using naive doubling strategy
Worth seeing how latency works out when a shard is under heavy load
Also, probably not a serious problem since only log requests are slow