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

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 low latency RPC and fast failure recovery. RAM-based storage brings great DCN-related challenges, e.g., false server failure detection due to network problems, traffic congestion during failure recovery, and ToR switch failure handling.

This paper presents RAMCube, a DCN-oriented design for RAM-based key-value store based on the BCube network [9]. RAMCube exploits the properties 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 demonstrates that RAMCube is promising to achieve high performance I/O and fast failure recovery in large-scale DCNs.