Applications - Extended Memory

Extended Memory

Extended memory addresses the scale limitations of Main Memory with a layer of DRAM that is more scalable and very high performance. Applications can use Extended Memory in several ways:

Swap Disk: A system with insufficient memory can use a swap disk for Virtual Memory. Pages of memory are swapped between the swap disk and DRAM. By using a Memory Appliance as the swap disk, the latency for swapping is dramatically reduced and applications are accelerated by a factor of 10 or more.

RAM Disk: A system with high I/O requirements can use a virtual disk (RAM Disk) in memory. The RAM Disk can be placed on a Memory Appliance and can scale capacity by a factor of 10 or more.

Memory Mapped files: Some files are critical to the performance of an application and can be transferred from a disk and placed in an address range mapped to the Memory Appliance. This significantly accelerates the application by removing the constraints of mechanical disks.

Applications that can benefit from the Extended Memory include database applications, large caches and large scale simulations.