Analyzing In-Memory NoSQL Landscape

In-memory key-value stores have quickly become a key enabling technology to build high-performance applications that must cope with massively distributed workloads. In-memory key-value stores (also referred to as NoSQL) primarly aim to offer low-latency and high-throughput data access which motivates the rapid adoption of modern network cards such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). In this paper, we present the fundamental design principles for exploiting RDMAs in modern NoSQL systems. Moreover, we describe a break-down analysis of the state-of-the-art of the RDMA-based in-memory NoSQL systems regarding the indexing, data consistency, and the communication protocol. In addition, we compare traditional in-memory NoSQL with their RDMA-enabled counterparts. Finally, we present a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the existing systems based on a wide range of configurations such as the number of clients, real-world request distributions, and workload read-write ratios.