, founded in 2006 in Portland, Ore., says it will not come out of stealth mode until Feb. 2 but has posted plenty of information about its technology on its Web site.

RNA says the removes latency penalties that affect application performance, and that its technology is already being used by a multi-billion dollar global hedge fund to speed up the processing of trades. RNA also has a partnership with Colfax International to combine its memory virtualization software with Colfax's high-performance computing systems.

RNA CEO Clive Cook, previously CEO of wireless broadband company Verilan and telecom software vendor Elematics, calls memory "the third wave of virtualization," after servers and storage.

"Memory virtualization, like server and storage virtualization, offers the benefits of consolidation and compelling cost savings," Cook writes in an article on . "Yet over and above early server and storage implementations, in 2009 memory virtualization will introduce a new way of thinking about virtualization that challenges the way IT manages applications, clustering, the data center, services and business itself." ()

While the words memory and storage are often used interchangeably, Cook says they are not synonymous, noting that data is retrieved from disk storage and then put into memory before it can be used by the processor. Adding storage doesn't necessarily solve problems related to , he writes.