128GB Memory?

[Khalil]

What application would a server be built for with that much ram?

[kilgoretrout]

Everything depends on the load. Even with that little ram you could probably setup a reasonably functional file server or print server using linux and samba or nfs.

[djminus1]

128GB is a little bit of RAM?????????????

I need to upgrade then!!

[matthews]

128 GB not MB...um yeah, that's overkill if you ask me, your CPU would bottleneck before your RAM ever would...yeesh. Most servers have 1 - 8 GB, some up to 16 or 32 GB, but 128 is kinda overkill :S, might want to cluster instead of putting all into one machine...

[kilgoretrout]

128 GB not MB...um yeah

My bad!!!

I've never seen that much ram in any server. But if I were to venture a guess, I'd say the most likely application would be for some huge, high load datatbase server.

[amdalex]

What density of RAM would a server like that use? It seems like the mobo would be giant.

[Masaki 7-11]

8GB ram modules are the ones that would most likely be used, I'm not sure how common they are, but that's most likely what would be used if it is a dual socket system with 8 ram slots per socket. If you had a quad socket system with 8 ram slots per socket, you could use 4GB ram modules. The motherboard would most likely be about the size of extended atx, but there are many formfactors for servers which I'm not familiar with.

[djminus1]

Perhaps a virtualized environment could use this much memory. Also, as mentioned previously, large databases and data warehouses.

I did a google search and found this. Its an 8-way Opteron server with memory capacity of 256GB.

http://www.xenon.com.au/news/?i=9

[amdalex]

I didn't know that todays servers were that powerful and had that much RAM. I guess I should pay more attention.

[djminus1]

Yeah...IT is growing by leaps an bounds. I sell IBM software, and we are finding that large-scale servers like this are helping customers to consolidate their datacenters, reduce power consumption, reduce heat, and save tons of $$$ on software liceensing.

In the IBM world, software is licensed by the size of the physical systems (usualy by the number of processors on the system). When you have many seperate servers, licensing a product (for example: backup software) gets very expensive. So what customers do is buy one huge server, install VMWare to create virtual systems, and use VMWare to convert all of their old physical servers to virtual images. This is basic server consolidation and many customers are doing it...mainly thanks to VMWare technology.