-written by Michael Stys, Dataram Memory Blog Team Member
In today’s business environment, it is becoming more of a common place to find IT Managers being asked to support more with fewer resources. While at the same time, these IT professionals are operating with a flat or shrinking IT budget. This is one of the reasons why IT departments are deploying creative solutions that will lower overall long-term operational costs and provide innovative, scalable solutions to address the changing landscape of how their users obtain information.
One of these innovative concepts is cloud computing. By centralizing infrastructure and applications, IT administrators are now able to more effectively support their clients and deliver content to an increasing number and types of devices. It is like corporations have created a new modern day mainframe consumed with information, and the smart phones and tablet PCs are the terminals we use to access this wealth of information. I guess we are building a smarter planet!
One of the main driving requirements at the center of cloud computing is processing power. For servers to run effectively and provide this increasing demand for processing power, servers require a minimum configuration of RAM. As applications are added to these servers more RAM is then required to maintain operational efficiency. This is why an increasing amount of datacenters are moving towards virtualization to increase the amount of VMs (virtual machines) that can run applications on a single hardware server. The short version is virtualization enables IT administrators to properly allocate the amount of hardware resources required by a specific application. Evidence of this relationship between the power of increased memory and virtualization can be found with VMware’s recent licensing update for vSphere VMware vSphere 5 Licensing Update .
Thankfully, RAM on a $ per GB basis continues to drop. For example, many servers that were purchased only a couple of years ago were sold with 4GB DIMMs. At that time the cost of 8GB DIMMs was too high and typically resulted in the cost of the server doubling. So, the IT department purchased two servers with 4GB DIMMs instead of one server with 8GB DIMMs. Today the price of an 8GB DIMM is at a price comparable or lower than the 4GB DIMM was a few years ago. Or, if you are really looking to maximize your server memory, most of the newer servers will now support16GB or 32GB DIMM options.
I believe in getting the most use out of any asset that I already have and then purchase new assets that will enable scalable growth into the future. If you have a server that is a year or two old, give it new life by maxing out its memory or replacing lower capacity RAM for higher capacity RAM. Then when you want to purchase your next server, look to Dataram to provide you with lower cost, higher capacity RAM.
