Spansion and Virident flash server farms

SPANSION, THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN as the Flash arm of AMD, and Virident – a “green” startup specializing in increasing computing and power efficiency - are tag-teaming it to deal with mounting power costs in server farms/datacenters.

The team has come forward with a new type of RAM that – surprise, surprise – isn’t DRAM at all. Dubbed the EcoRAM, the concept introduces high-performance NOR+NAND Flash to replace standard DRAM inside servers, reducing power consumption of the memory end of business to an eighth of current levels. Virident’s contribution is the “Green Gateway” platform sitting in the middle of things that will enable servers to address up to a potential 1TB of EcoRAM. In truth, it quadruples the server’s memory capacity, breaking server’s memory limitations by far and wide.

The EcoRAM’s read and write performance, combined with Virident’s technology, turns “Flash into high-capacity, DRAM-class memory”, sayeth the companies. In order to do this, Spansion mixes-up their MirrorBit NOR and ORNAND into a single die, taking literally the best of both worlds.

NOR Flash does have some architectural features that make it easier to implement as DRAM (XIP, eXecute In Place, for one), but write performance is usually poor compared to NAND. On the other hand NAND has poor random access read performance. Using the mix, the companies believe they can up the write performance on these chips anywhere from 2 to 10 times as fast.

In essence, if you’re a RAM constrained business, the EcoRAM will sort you out, and if you’re not, you can do away with 3 out of every 4 servers (sticking to the RAM criteria), as it quads your RAM capacity. The parts are available as of this moment in (up to) 32GB DIMMS, but density should double next year with the 45nm fabbing of 4-Gbit chips.

Some experts claim power consumption (by servers and cooling) in datacenters accounts for half the total TCO of said equipment. Reducing power consumption and heat generation in server farms should lower the power bill a bit. The companies, however, fail to mention the added data-loss prevention that Flash brings to the equation – which would account for added savings when it comes to operating backup systems; or what the wear-and-tear of Flash is in a data center environment, but hey, what the heck, the message is “green”, innit? µ