Nutanix, Inc.
METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR A DURABLE LOW LATENCY SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Abstract:

A method and apparatus for a durable low latency system architecture. The method includes providing an apparatus that includes a battery backup electrically coupled to a motherboard, and to a non-volatile storage device (either through additional circuitry to through the motherboard itself). The process leverages the battery backup to allow for durably maintaining write requests in volatile memory while the system is operating on standard input power. When the system switches to battery power the write requests maintained in the volatile memory are persisted in a non-volatile storage device using the battery power. Thus, the write requests are durably maintained in a RAM where they are only copied to a persistent storage location that is not the write request target location when there is a failure of the power input to the system.