Virident GreenCloud Servers Use Flash EcoRam for up to 100x MySQL Performance

A new product launched as a joint venture between Spansion and Virident uses Flash RAM technology to boost MySQL performance on servers an amazing 50 to 100 times current levels. Named “EcoRAM” by the developers, the new technology has been used to build servers that include up to 512 GB of Flash RAM per machine. According to VentureBeat, “EcoRAM can fetch data in hundreds of nanoseconds, while hard drives are 10,000 times slower and standard flash memory is 100 times slower.”  This is being specifically targeted to social networking sites with high volume and whose servers experience overloads in MySQL queries.

“Virident Systems, a newcomer run by a co-founder of SGI, has started down that sometimes thankless, unforgiving path of a disruptive new server company. For its value proposition it’s using Flash instead of traditional memory, targeting the Internet data centers like Google that now account for over 25% of the $65 billion worldwide server market. Wikia is an early customer. Reportedly all of the top websites are kicking Virident’s tires. So are some up-and-comers.”

“The company argues that the servers these data centers are using were designed for the compute age, not the tsunami of data they’re engulfed by or the data-centric, query-rich applications they’re trying to run, which is why they buy so many of them and why virtualization, good perhaps at utilization but not speed, isn’t a remedy. Enter the so-called GreenCloud Architecture, which is supposed to turn the industry standard server into a suitable data-centric in-memory server platform, delivering orders of magnitude better application performance, serious consolidation, lower TCO and real energy efficiency.”

I have seen a number of high-end gaming laptops incorporating Flash-based hard drives recently, a 2 to 3 year industry shift away from Dynamic RAM and Magnetic Hard Drives to fully loaded Flash systems would stir up quite a lot of change in the manufacturing sector. Spansion, the world’s largest producer of Flash RAM, is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings currently. Formed as a collaboration between AMD and Toshiba, the company could not withstand the crash in the chip sector that also took out rival Qimonda. Nevertheless, Spansion has just won a patent liability judgment against Samsung, and with it a $70 million reward. The company could jump back quickly on high demand for EcoRAM servers.

Virident unveiled the GreenCloud Server at the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo held this year in California:

“GreenCloud innovates by enabling the MySQL database to reside entirely ’in−memory’ in very large memory configurations – from 128GB to  512GB today. When compared to production systems which often split the MySQL database between DRAM and disk, GreenCloud can deliver extreme application−level performance for MySQL.  50−70x* improvements in application performance have been observed on typical data center workloads that involve random access to small block sizes common to web workloads.    While industry standard servers typically feature two−tiers of storage — DRAM and disk — the Virident GreenCloud Server for MySQL adds a new tier of high performance ‘storage class memory’ to break the ‘memory bottleneck’ responsible for low efficiency in today’s ‘scale−out’ database tiers.  This new storage class memory tier pioneers the use of non−volatile enterprise−class flash as additional main memory in a server – which can deliver high bandwidth, low latency and random access at small block sizes to very large data sets.  In production database environments, GreenCloud breaks through the 64GB practical ‘in−memory’ limit on production systems.  GreenCloud offers persistence in this expanded memory tier, keeping data ‘always available’ when a server is restarted in a cluster, minimizing down time.  GreenCloud for MySQL also provides multiple hardware and software protection technologies (ViriSafe), which deliver enterprise−class reliability.”

“Said Virident CTO and co−founder Vijay Karamcheti, ‘GreenCloud just may be the world’s fastest and most scalable MySQL server. According to recent benchmark studies*, the improvements in performance, scalability, manageability and energy and cost efficiency for MySQL are compelling and represent a fundamentally new and better approach to building a large scale database infrastructure.   We are excited by the performance gains we have been able to deliver through the optimization of our platform for MySQL and we are confident that the GreenCloud Server for MySQL will become a standard building block for the MySQL database tier.’ ”

“The GreenCloud Server for MySQL, a 2U rack server with dual quad−core CPU’s and with 80GB−576GB of ‘in−memory’ dataset capacity, is priced beginning at $6,000 in the United States.  Each GreenCloud Server for MySQL comes bundled with the complete software environment (consisting of MySQL, MyISAM, and InnoDB).”

In summary, the GreenCloud Server looks to be a game changer, adding a whole new architecture level to computer hardware that should continue to increase in speed & capacity while decreasing in size and cost, potentially scaling to innumerable devices. With regard to the server industry, Karamcheti says, “It is the first server designed with the internet in mind.” Whether or not it is true, the announcement does point the way to computing systems that are completely free of the magnetic disc drive, which may disappear like the floppy in the next 5 years. The GreenCloud Server also presents a challenge to other server companies, who will surely release similarly configured devices with Flash RAM banks for high-end clients. Hopefully, we will also see the Flash RAM boost emerge in the consumer / personal computing market soon.