The Scalable Systems research team at Yahoo is contributing a significant enhancement to the forthcoming release of Apache HBase 2.0 called Accordion, an algorithm that simultaneously improves performance speed and disk space, two metrics typically considered at odds. Accordion optimizes RAM by re-organizing in-memory data in efficient data structures and reducing redundancies. The HBase server’s memory footprint then periodically expands and contracts (like an Accordion) to produce a longer lifetime of data in memory, less I/O, and overall faster performance.