RNA Networks Announces RNA Cache; Network Memory

RNA Cache virtualizes memory across computers speeding access and processing time.

June 22, 2009

2 Min Read
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As computing power grows, so does memory. We know that increasing memory on a server can often have a bigger impact on performance than faster CPU or I/O. The problem is that computers are often limited in the amount of memory in the servers. RNA Network's RNA Cache uses servers attached to the network to pool memory into a large cache that can be multiple terabytes in size. The increased memory access speed at a price starting at $2000 per computer and may make RNA Cache an alternative to adding more RAM, using SSD drives, or disk drives as virtual memory.
RNA Cache components are agents that run on Unix based computers. The RNAdriver nodes access the virtual memory in the cache. RNAserver nodes contribute memory to the memory cache. And the RNAmanager is used to manage, monitor, and provision nodes. The node software is transparent to the OS once it is installed. Nodes can both contribute to the cache as well as read from the cache simultaneously. Nodes communicate via remote direct memory access, RDMA, or via existing Infiniband, 10gb, 1gb Ethernet.
Accessing the virtual memory is similar to how virtual memory is handled in computers. If the data is stored in the RNA Cache, the data will be pulled from it, otherwise, the data will by pulled from the source, a file most likely, and will populate the cache. RNA Cache manages the distributed memory automatically ensuring coherence and availability.
RNA Cache offers a shared resource to computers with the ability to serve multiple computers from the  same memory cache simultaneously. For example, financial analytics and simulation programs require large amounts of memory for the data sets. Distributing processing over multiple servers all using the same memory cache vastly speeds up operations. A reference customer said an analysis that used to take 92 minutes to complete dropped to 5.3 minutes.
RNA might also be an alternative to memcached, a memory object caching system used to cache database requests in web applications. Unlike memcached, RNA Cache can work with any memory objects and offers a more configurable and manage approach.
RNA Cache is a good fit in cases where your data sets are larger than your physical memory can store; where data processing is distributed among multiple systems, and where virtual memory is disk based. Representatives claim RNA Cache is 10 times faster than expensive SSD drives and a hundred times faster than disk.

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