"I think you will see some really interesting things come out of this research," Hillsberg said of the demonstration.

IBM is not alone in its enthusiasm for using solid-state storage as a way to speed operations. In this month's Association for Computing Machinery "Communications" publication, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs that combines low-power processors and flash memory, a design that could significantly speed operations for transaction-heavy large websites.

Like IBM's setup, the researchers' Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN) architecture only requires a relatively small amount of flash memory, on which the most frequently consulted data can be stored. They noted that while solid-state storage can cost 10 times as much as traditional disks, they can offer 100 percent performance boost.

The idea of building flash-memory-assisted servers "is not that far out. The technology already exists," said Luiz André Barroso, a Google distinguished engineer who was not involved in FAWN.