To some extent, but a lesser extent, the same could be said for Go: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-... (It's a bit weird reading that page, because it's broken into two graphs, but they appear to be about the same thing.)
If I were thinking "trendy language to write my next database in" personally I'd favor Rust by a country mile. This is exactly where you'd like all that stuff Rust provides just for correctness' sake, and this is the sort of task where you may even be able to outrun C++ if Rust helps you write correct code with fewer barriers slathered about for correctness.
Edit: Ha, and just below this comment as I read it I see the team commenting about Rust.
Erlang is not good for "high performance distributed" systems. It's good for systems whose primary characteristic is uptime rather than latency or throughput.