Big Bytes

Posted on February 25, 2008

Do you have your first terabyte drive yet? Maybe not individually, but a good many people have over a terabyte of storage when including external drives and maybe added internal ones. I know my box has a couple of 320GB Externals along with a 650GB on top of two internals that have been around for awhile and are 40GB and 60GB. So that’s around 1.4 TB.

But what about RAM? Well, what about it? I’ve got a Gig…and you?

Well, believe it or not, now you (if you have the money) can get a terabyte of RAM!

Silicon Valley startup MetaRam, announced an advanced chipset which can quadruple the maximum amount of memory which can be used in certain server configurations. Furthermore, the price will allegedly be fairly low.

MetaRam claims that with a four-processor server with 16 cores and 256GB of RAM, the price range now starts at under $50,000, compared with almost $500,000 for a classical system with the same configuration, a 90 percent reduction in system cost.

The new technology enables servers to use up to 128GB of memory per processor, which means a 8-processor server can use one terabyte of memory.

And all that means a lot to folks like Wal-Mart who need access to their 9 Petabytes of data…