I mentioned Spansion’s EcoRAM in today’s Green IT roundup and became intrigued. Luckily, VentureBeat was there to satisfy my curiosity.

EcoRAM, developed by startup Virident and built by Spansion, uses flash memory chips to replace dynamic random access memory and hard disks in data center servers. Server vendors have put EcoRAM through testing and have come up with results for read-intensive workloads.

That means server operations where data is fed to someone, like when a server sends a web page to someone’s home computer. EcoRAM can fetch data in hundreds of nanoseconds, while hard drives are 10,000 times slower and standard flash memory is 100 times slower

If you’re thinking this would be perfect for caching, you’re right. Virident is offering two GreenCloud Servers, one specifically tailored for Memcached and another for MySQL (both powered by Linux CentOS 5). Expect to see some database-driven websites to become blazingly fast if the 50-70x performance boost over standard, hard-drive equipped server configurations (5-7x over servers with SSDs) in benchmarks translates into real-world performance.

So far, EcoRAM is winning raves from the Stanford Exploration Project’s Robert Clapp, senior research engineer of geophysics at Stanford University, who has seen the technology whittle down the time it takes some tasks to complete from hours to minutes.

GreenCloud Servers start at $6,000 US.

Source: VentureBeat