Patent ID: 8745331

Claim:
A method for improving replication persistence and storage capacity in a caching appliance structure comprising: creating a plurality of data partitions by a primary catalog service that manages a collective of caching appliances in a networked computing environment, wherein each data partition of the plurality of data partitions comprises a primary shard and at least one replica shard; storing the primary shard of the data partition within a memory space of a first caching appliance; storing the at least one replica shard of the data partition within a non-volatile storage space of a second caching appliance, wherein the first and the second caching appliances are separate physical devices, and, wherein the non-volatile storage space allows read and write transactions, whereby memory space of the second caching appliance that could have been used to store the at least one replica shard is available for storing primary shards for other data partitions, whereby a capacity of the collective of caching appliances is increased; loading the replica shard of the first data partition into the memory space of the second caching appliance and directly promoting the loaded replica shard to a primary shard of the first data partition, upon detection of a failure of the first caching appliance; and accessing the memory space of the second caching appliance for performing operations on the promoted primary shard for the duration of failure of the first caching appliance.