Coming to a server near you. And with there being rumors that we might be done with 32-bit after this version (both Windows and SQL), then having a terabyte of RAM or more seems like a something that you might be looking for.
But if you've priced out motherboards and the changes that might be needed to get more RAM into existing architectures, you realize this isn't always feasible for most companies. The article talks about a new way of building the chips to make them not only more dense, but also get existing DIMM architectures to work with them.
SQL Server is a memory hungry beast and while the new compression features of SQL Server 2008 might help, simply adding more RAM is something that most of us would like to do. And instead of being capped at 64GB of RAM, the MetaRam technology might allow you to grow to 128GB or 256GB. I've never had that much memory, but I have run to capacity on systems in the past, and I'm sure there are some of you out there that run into that regularly.
And buying a new server isn't always the answer. Instead of a few thousand dollars for RAM, you might be talking tens of thousands to get to a new, larger architecture.
I don't know what the pitfalls might be, and I assume that you'd need to be running 64-bit servers to really take advantage of this RAM. I'm not sure a PAE-enabled 32-bit server gets a huge boost from moving to 32GB, 64GB, or more RAM. However with the addressable space of a 64-bit system, and the ability to use that RAM for all types of data and procedure cache, this could be a boon.
The press release from last week talks about a 4-way server (16 cores) with 256GB or RAM for US$50,000. That's an expensive server, but I know I've paid more for much less capable systems, and not even that long ago.
If you are in the 64-bit world and bumping up against RAM limits, this is something you might want to check out. I just can't wait for something like this to hit my laptop and get 32GB or RAM in that thing.
Assuming Windows 7 or whatever's next can make use of it.
Steve Jones
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