To achieve high performance transaction systems vertical as well as horizontal system growth is considered. A prime obstacle for linear performance growth is the unfavourable ratio of I/O time vs. CPU time in systems using conventional disk architecture. For this reason, we propose a fast and non-volatile extended memory which provides
synchronous page-oriented access for closely coupled processors. We discuss its properties supporting high volume transaction processing. Subsequently, we investigate its performance behavior using simulation driven by load models derived form real applications. Simulation results are presented for centralized and distributed
computing environments.