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But I had heard, the only catch is that, they are using 'desktop grade' hardware.

So do Google :)

IIRC Google gave up on non-ECC RAM a long time ago, so this is only partially true (ECC RAM constrains motherboard chipset and CPU family (e.g. Core i7 and suchlike don't support it))

Looks like a wide range of Intel CPUs support ECC.

http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true

From Google 2009:

DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

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