Look interesting. Is like a mongodb + redis in one? If i understood it well, if the coordinator die then everything die? Any plan in provide pub/sub? And/or capped collections (by number (keep 1000) or TTL (keep 24h))
HyperDex is a next generation NoSQL store, so it kind of resembles traditional NoSQL stores like Mongo, Cassandra, Riak, and Dynamo, with a rich interface similar to that of Redis, but it offers much stronger properties than all of these systems. It differs from Mongo in that it provides much stronger consistency and fault-tolerance guarantees. Mongo's default will gladly pretend that an operation was committed even before it was seen by any server. HyperDex differs from Redis in that it shards its data across a network and is generally designed from the ground up for a networked environment. Both Redis and Mongo can and will return stale results following a failure whereas HyperDex will always return consistent results -- it guarantees something called "linearizability" for key-based operations, which roughly means that time will never go backwards from the point of view of any client. And in spite of offering stronger properties, HyperDex is faster than both Mongo and Redis on industry-standard benchmarks.
The HyperDex coordinator sounds like a singular entity, but is in fact a redundant, replicated service. The Paxos algorithm (provided by the ConCoord implementation here: http://openreplica.org) ensures that the coordinator overall can survive failures of some of the coordinator replicas.
Building a pub/sub system on top of HyperDex would be an excellent project.
HyperDex does not support "capped collections" out of the box, but it would be trivial to implement these with a background thread that prunes the database. The data store supports sorted queries, so you can say "return the top-1000 objects sorted by insertion time" or whatever else metric you liked to sort by. And you can delete groups of objects. These operations are implemented efficiently.
Hope these help.