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.

Letting applications directly interact with large volumes of data hosted in memory is supposed to guarantee optimal utilization of the server's compute, memory and I/O, making it a better building block for scale-out architectures and the cloud.

Its builders claim Virident's is the "first server designed with the Internet in mind" and that makes memory the "new disk" in the computing hierarchy, the stuff of tremendous increases in bandwidth, performance and scalability, it claims.

The start-up's architecture calls for a new storage-class memory tier populated with so-called enterprise-class Flash, both NOR and NAND, and hybrids that combine DRAM, Flash and Phase-Change Memory (PCM), that successor to Flash, procured from either Spansion, which owns a piece of Virident, and Numonyx, the Intel-STMicroelectronics Flash spin-out.

Since it's focused on the webby set, Virident is initially offering a GreenCloud Server for MySQL, the open source database popular in Web 2.0 applications, and a GreenCloud Server for Memcached, the increasingly popular caching application.

Leaving nothing to chance, Virident says it's optimized the boxes' software stack

It claims 50x-70x performance improvements on MySQL. It's optimized both MyISAM and the InnoDB storage engine to eliminate I/O bottlenecks. It claims a 4x performance increase and up to 8x on available cache memory with Memcached, delivering 250,000 object gets a second and supporting caches with up to three billion objects.

The widgetry comes in 1U and 2U rack configurations with dual AMD quad-core processors and support for in-memory datasets of 128GB-512GB, starting at $12,000

Virident's initial products use Spansion Flash. In the second half it expects to field products using Numonyx widgetry. The start-up has also licensed Intel's QuickPath Interconnect so move to Intel's Xeon chips and not be limited to Opteron and Linux.