One vendor doesn't mind high RAM prices: VMware

The high price of memory and solid-state storage has almost everyone worried – but not VMware, because the most innovative new feature in the Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) private cloud suite it launched last year is memory tiering tech that allows offload of data from RAM to NVMe drives.

VMware has always promoted VCF 9 memory tiering as offering the chance to reduce infrastructure costs by reducing the amount of RAM needed in new servers, and by creating the opportunity to upgrade the NVMe drives in old boxes and effectively increase their memory capacity. Last week, the Broadcom business unit doubled down on those positions.

Those arguments are of course a little self-serving, because the cost of NVMe storage has also risen. VMware also admits that memory tiering won’t work for every workload and isn’t suitable for latency-sensitive or very large VMs.

But VMware’s memory tiering is ...