Perhaps the most significant development and least discussed
trend of 2011 has been the astonishing drop in the prices of
RAM. This change is rapidly reshaping all aspects of computing
(and therefore programming) in every category of computing
device. If you haven't looked at IT hardware lately, here's a
reverse sticker shock: Today, you can buy a Dell server with
96GB of RAM for less than $5,000. And if you want to go really
big, a 64-core server with 512GB of RAM, costs less than $30K.
That's an almost throw-away price for hardware that truly
qualifies as supercomputer-scale.As IT organizations embrace
this favorable pricing, they're trying to figure out what to do
with all the RAM. This is a problem that not unlike the one
college students face after they'be bought a 12GB laptop for
less than $2K. Too often they come up with the solution: Do
nothing. The extra resources lie fallow and I mean all the
resources: the CPU, the RAM, the disk, and the network bandwidth
all remain substantially underutilized. It'