Amazon Aurora does something similar in the sense that it decouples InnoDB functions including buffer cache and storage access from the overlying MySQL engine.

Amazon Aurora does something similar in the sense that it decouples InnoDB functions including buffer cache and storage access from the overlying MySQL engine. The decoupled InnoDB lives on separate VM(s) and includes optimized data replication to support DBMS high availability. For example, with Aurora you can failover a large DBMS in seconds to a new site and have it come up with a heated buffer cache since that replicates too. This approach makes sense for Aurora because it leverages cloud storage to provide data high availability across availability zones. Just putting InnoDB in a file system seems less interesting unless you add features that are strikingly different from what it does now. See http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.pdf http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.pd... for a full description.