Deploying Higher Level Building Blocks for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing Datacenters: How Tightly Coupled Data Access Appliances Simplify Scaling, Decrease Business Complexity, and Cut TCO

Today's Web and cloud computing datacenters have reached a critical juncture as exploding demand for their services has collided with existing architectures and technologies. These datacenters leverage standard low-cost X86 servers, Gigabit Ethernet interconnect, and open-source software to build scale-out applications with tiering, data, and application partitioning, Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM)-based content caching servers, and application layer node failure tolerance. These loosely coupled architectures have enabled service scaling - but at a very high cost. Today's datacenters are reeling from the high costs of power, capital equipment, network connectivity, and space, and are hindered by serious performance, scalability, and application complexity issues.