Flash storage has lower reading latency than hard disk drives because it doesn't need to spin a disk to get to a particular bit of data. With SSDs (solid-state disks) and PCI Express flash cards, it's possible to read data anywhere in the device in less than a millisecond, compared with several milliseconds on a hard drive. This can have some utility in individual enterprises, but the real benefit comes at the scale of public cloud computing, where one service provider may be delivering data to hundreds or thousands of customers at the same time.

Though flash still has some hurdles to overcome on the road to wide deployment, some Web-based services companies see it as the most promising advance happening in IT infrastructure.

"In the last 20 years, spinning disk really hasn't gone any faster, and right now we're really on the cusp of a change with flash technologies," said Richard Buckingham, vice president of technical operations at MySpace, at the Structure conference in June in San Francisco.

MySpace rival Facebook praised flash at the same conference. "Flash is going to have a very, very significant effect on not just storage, but infrastructure as a whole. And I think it's going to have at least as significant an impact as going from single-core to multicore CPUs," said Facebook Vice President of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger.

Internet-based companies expect to use flash in different ways, but scale is a major concern for all of them. It's this factor that could turn flash into the game-changer at online companies that it won't be for most enterprises, according to Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman. SSDs and flash storage cards take up less space and power than spinning disks, even while they deliver bits faster. Cloud-based companies' data centers are so big that these benefits really matter, he said.