From the architecture overview:
Aerospike is a fast Key Value Store or Distributed Hash Table architected to be a flexible NoSQL platform for today’s high scale Apps. Designed to meet the reliability or ACID requirements of traditional databases, there is no single point of failure (SPOF) and data is never lost. Aerospike can be used as an in-memory database and is uniquely optimized to take advantage of the dramatic cost benefits of flash storage. Written in C, Aerospike runs on Linux.
Based on our own experiences developing mission-critical applications with high scale databases and our interactions with customers, we’ve developed a general philosophy of operational efficiency that guides product development. Three principles drive Aerospike architecture: NoSQL flexibility, traditional database reliability, and operational efficiency.
Technical details first published in Proceeding of the VLDB (Very Large Databases), Citrusleaf: A Real-Time NoSQL DB which Preserves ACID by V. Srinivasan and Brian Bulkowski.
You can guess why they changed the name. 😉
There is a free community edition, along with an SDK and documentation.
Relies on RAM and SDDs.
Timo Elliott was speculating about entirely RAM-based computing in: In-Memory Computing.
Imagine losing all the special coding tricks to get performance despite disk storage.
Simpler code and fewer operations should result in higher speed.