Is Your Memory Getting Cloudy?

Todd Hoff at High Scalability provides a wealth of information and links to for folks running large and/or high-traffic web sites. Today it has an interesting post titled Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? Todd looks back at the history of web architecture and ahead to we here things may go next, as well as discussing providers in the cloud memory space. 

“What makes Memory Based Architectures different from traditional architectures is that memory is the system of record,” writes Todd Hoff. “Typically disk based databases have been the system of record. Disk has been King, safely storing data away within its castle walls. Disk being slow, we’ve ended up wrapping disks in complicated caching and distributed file systems to make them perform.

“Sure, memory is used as all over the place as cache, but we’re always supposed to pretend that cache can be invalidated at any time and old Mr. Reliable, the database, will step in and provide the correct values,” he adds. “In Memory Based Architectures, memory is where the “official” data values are stored.” Read more at High Scalability.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.