RAMCube: Exploiting Network Proximity for RAM-Based Key-Value Store

MSR-TR-2012-98 |

Disk-based storage is becoming increasingly problematic in meeting the needs of large-scale cloud applications. Recently RAM-based storage is proposed by aggregating the RAM of thousands of commodity servers in data center networks (DCN). These studies focus on improving performance with high throughput I/O, low latency RPC and fast failure recovery. RAM-based storage brings great DCN-related challenges, for example, false server failure detection due to network problems, traffic congestion during failure recovery, and top-of-rack (ToR) switch failures.

This paper presents it RAMCube, a DCN-oriented design for RAM-based key-value store based on the BCube network. RAMCube exploits network proximity of BCube to restrict all failure detection and recovery traffic within one-hop neighborhood, and leverages BCube’s multiple paths to handle switch failures. Prototype implementation and experimental evaluation demonstrate that RAMCube is promising to achieve reliable, high performance I/O and fast failure recovery in large-scale data centers.