Seems like an odd invention given the industry is moving to storage technologies with sub-microsecond latencies, which is at least an order of magnitude better

Seems like an odd invention given the industry is moving to storage technologies with sub-microsecond latencies, which is at least an order of magnitude better than 10ge is usually capable of. Still at least 'object store' style operations are much richer, so the need is avoided to make many round trips to the disk to resolve the location of a database record. Hmm, which raises the question: how much RAM should a hard disk have? In a regular architecture, that database lookup could be meaningfully cached (and you could design and provision exactly to ensure your entire set is cached). Opaque K/V "disk" seems less appealing from this angle