If hardware price squeezes make you sad, VMware says it will all end in tiers

VMware is working to find new roles for its memory tiering technology, in the expectation that memory and hardware prices will remain high for years and users will therefore look for ways to put off server purchases. Memory tiering moves data out of DRAM and onto another storage medium that’s fast enough that CPUs can still access info at speeds that don’t slow application performance. VMware’s implementation works by looking for “cold pages” in DRAM – chunks of memory containing data that a CPU hasn’t touched and/or won’t need for a while. When a CPU can’t find any capacity in DRAM, it can pause operations until memory becomes available. That leaves CPUs and expensive DRAM idling wastefully when they could be churning...

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