

Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? - randomwalker
http://highscalability.com/are-cloud-based-memory-architectures-next-big-thing

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lsb
Here's 10 minutes of your life:

    
    
      1) RAM is a lot faster than disk, keep things there for speed.
      2) "RAM is the new disk."  "Or is disk the new RAM?"
      3) 5 ads for Java companies.
    

Nowhere does it say that Facebook is running the world's largest memcached
installation. Or, for that matter, that HN is all in memory.

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jwilliams
It mentions Facebook?

One distinction this article never fleshed out is the difference between
memory caching and memory as a System of Record - this is mentioned very early
on, but then the rest of the article seems to be a mixture of these
techniques.

Not sure I'd be keen to use memory as a SoR at this stage. You leave yourself
vulnunerable to bugs, and deployment would be a nightmare... So - given that -
If you want to snapshot some kind of consistent state, then I don't see why
you wouldn't stick with disk for the moment.

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toddh
Yes, early in the article it says "Facebook has northwards of 800 memcached
servers creating a reservoir of 28 terabytes of memory enabling a 99% cache
hit rate." I've covered this stuff before so I don't explore the topic. It's a
device to quickly show how memory is being used by serious companies to do
serious things.

Caching is mentioned as related to but not the same as SoR, but you are right,
I don't spend a lot of time on it.

I understand why you wouldn't be keen, but it is at least something to think
about.

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oomkiller
I think this article is close, but misses an important player, SSDs. SSDs
bring super-fast data rates that can be amplified by traditional techniques
(striping etc), but work enough like disk systems so that applications don't
have to be rewritten. I believe that we will see SSD speeds continue to
increase, along with widespread adoption and price reduction. On the software
side, I believe that many commonly used applications will begin to detect SSDs
and (un)optimize their code for them. In my opinion, memory will always be the
fastest, but SSD gives the reliability and backwards computability that will
cause mass-adoption.

I think we'll see (and have already seen) the early-adopters and power users
start adopting SSDs at a high rate. Business adoption usually follows after a
few years. So my prediction is that we'll see 1TB or larger sized SSDs, that
are increasingly faster, within a few years. I think we'll start seeing DB
arrays with multiple SSDs in a Raid0+1 or similar, probably up to 10TB or
larger.

Does anyone else feel this way.

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rgrieselhuber
Enjoyed this post. Most of the in-memory solutions seemed focused around Java
/ .NET. What are the major open source (if any) solutions for Python / Rails /
PHP?

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njharman
memcached?

There's memory only versions/addons to Tokyo Cabinet which I can't find right
now. And I've recently read about a couple other memory (although disk backed)
key-value systems. They're the new hotness.

Or am I not getting what author means by "cloud based memory"? It sounds like
nothing more than what Erlang + mnesia has been doing for ages. Even MySQL has
it's in memory Cluster engine. Although, I doubt that scales to cloud levels.

