[topher-the-geek]

> So, in Sinfonia, the memory nodes HAVE to be highly available, or you've built a system with many single points of failure instead of just one.

Yes, in Sinfonia that's true since an item resides on only one node. The Scalaris project augments Sinfonia by performing operations on a majority of replicas.

> the other is a consensus protocol which replicates a log across unreliable nodes

Interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that. Indeed, when you frame it that way, it doesn't seem right to compare a minitransaction to multi-Paxos. I had thought of multi-Paxos as a mechanism to serialize updates on the replicas of a key-value store. In that framing, the comparison makes more sense.