this may be a stupid question but...

have you thought of supporting a RAM disk emulation in your new "flash as RAM" solution?

• The results will reveal interesting performance anomalies (in the flash as DRAM emulation) and (if they exist) complex quality idiosyncrasies.
  
  That's because RAM disk software is mature and generally well behaved. But flash as a RAM software is relatively new. Running one as an emulation on the other means you can leverage well proven flash SSD benchmark tools to see if there are holes or spikes in the RAM emulation software.
  
  This isn't going to magic away the need for true RAM tier evaluation tools. Something I've touched on before in a news story is it realistic to talk about memory IOPS?
  
  But you will learn something useful from the gap between ideal behavior and what you measure.

• Another reason is this... In the present state of the market the need for pure play vanilla SSD storage (whether it's dressed up as AFA (capacity or performance optimized), or hybrid appliance or SDS is healthy and users will still be buying such quaint old fashioned products for many years to come. But....
  
  In the long term future... in another 5 to 10 years - such "storage focused" implementations of memory systems will become a smaller part of the overall local storage market. ("Local" being on your premises and not in the cloud. In the cloud we assume they will still find value based uses for cheap old slow stuff in the same way as they currently do with hard drives.)
  
  Instead - I think that "storage" itself may become just a software selectable setting in resource boxes which are really just big memory systems. The forerunners of which I hinted at in my blog - after AFAs - what's the next box?
  
  When all storage is made from memory chips - then the decision - sell it as memory or sell it as storage - may become a business and branding decision rather than a true representation of the technology in the box.