Leveraging memory mirroring for transparent memory scale-out with zero-downtime failover of remote hosts

Abstract

Enterprises today are struggling with exponential growth in data volumes, leading to an increased demand for scale-out solutions for applications. The resiliency of such solutions to faults might be compromised, as the risk of failure increases with the number of hosts participating in the system. In this paper we present a transparent memory scale out solution based on memory mirroring, guaranteeing zero downtime failover of remote hosts. Mirroring-based approaches have been avoided in the past due to limitations of older generation networking fabrics, yet progress achieved by newer generations has significantly mitigated these limitations. We demonstrate high performance and fault resiliency of our solution using synthetic and commercial benchmarks. Im proving fault resiliency with memory mirroring enhances the practicality of memory scale-out solutions.