[petercooper]

Ousterhout's proposed system is based on dynamic random access memory (DRAM). [..] In a data center, fetching bits from DRAM and sending them over the center's internal network should be 100 to 1,000 times faster than getting it from a disk.

So the "trick" is "caching data in memory" but with more memory and spread across multiple machines. This is already the bread and butter for many infrastructure developers and sysadmins.

It'll be more interesting to see what memristor technology brings. The first commercially available solutions are due in the next couple of years and we'll most likely have cost effective, non-volatile DRAM-speed memory by 2020.