Also, a quick knee-jerk question. How did Cassandra, HBase fail to meet your requirements? I am sure you must have evaluated existing data-stores before you went ahead building your own.
Those systems are designed for small values. Typically in the order of few bytes to KB.
side-question to OP who is probably the blog author: Which software was used to generate the diagrams?
Haven't read the blog post or the paper but SIGMOD is a prestigious conference. Congrats on the great work.
thank you. I used an app called paper on the IPAD.