We all know how the cost versus capacity of USB memory keys for personal devices such as cameras have fallen in recent times. But what has been the trend for memory on commercial servers?
Not surprisingly, it turns out that memory for commercial servers has enjoyed similar reductions and Price/capacity has continued to drop significantly year on year since the turn of the century.
The chart below plots the price per GB of memory for x86 servers from two leading vendors over time. The data was extracted from Competitive Profiles CPSystems module and plots either the current price for present generation memory modules or the last known price before older products were withdrawn from the market. Memory capacities featured include 128MB right through to 64GB options/boards.
This is just a small sample of products and memory options and so cannot be considered comprehensive research into the subject. But I think the findings are interesting all the same and allow some quantization of the Price/GB reductions over time. The trend line shows that since 2001 memory options on these servers has dropped on average around $US200/GB every year.
Although there have been big improvements in the Price per capacity of memory, it is worth noting that the gains have been made in capacity rather than absolute price. So even though we are seeing significant Price/GB declines, the same cannot be said of absolute prices, which don’t show the same significant downwards trend. Basically what that means is the cost of memory option now is generally the same as the turn of the century, you just get more bang (capacity) for your buck. That is, what you might have paid for 128MB then you might pay now for 2GB. In much the same way USB Memory keys have generally maintained their price points, but the capacity you get now is like chalk and cheese, compared to just a few years ago.
The other factor to consider with these massive improvements is whether all this extra capacity translates into extra capability. You probably take the same number of digital photos on a family day out now, compared to then. However, the improved pixel rate of that shiny new camera means you need those big memory sticks to store, essentially the same number of photos as a few years ago.
The same I suspect may be true for servers. Improved software functionality and bigger data sets requires more memory, which is probably eating up some of these gains in available memory capacity. That is, these gains don’t necessarily go straight to the bottom line increased overall business throughput, although the extra functionality provides a richer experience along the way.
Now we are entering the era of Virtualization and new demands are beginning to be placed on systems, which will probably require even more memory.
Are you factoring in, or have factored in, extra memory capacity to run your business? We would be interested to hear your comments. You can place comments below.
Comments