As the market for DRam plummets, memory vendor Kingston Technology has demonstrated new ways for system builders to create revenue.

The increasing demand for virtualisation services could create better opportunities for system builders, and improved margins on memory, said Steve Hall, product marketing manager at Kingston Technology.

But he said they will have to change the way they source and supply memory products.

Hall spoke to CRN at the joint VM08 and IP08 shows at Earls Court in London. Kingston ran a stand demonstrating to IT managers how success and failure of a project hinges on memory.

Two identical high-end Toshiba laptops were on display. One had 1GB of RAM, the other 8GB of RAM. The 1GB RAM laptop began to slow after being partitioned into two virtual machines running a basket of applications. But the 8GB RAM machine was still furiously number crunching after being partitioned 15 times.

“We have had all sorts of project managers in here today, from manufacturing, the police, to the finance sector,” said Hall.

“All have big departments that want to rationalise. Their first reaction is to ask, why is Kingston at a virtualisation show. The second reaction is that they need to order some more memory.”

Hall said there will be a lot of demand for system builders that can manage a virtualisation project for clients. But they will have to improve how the memory is supported.

System builders tend to source memory through Kingston’s Value RAM channel. But no-frills products are a false economy to business-class customers and Hall said that VARs will need to step up and offer service through its systems-specific memory channel, if they want to keep the customers.

Virtualisation is mission critical, so resellers should not be afraid to charge more for features such as burn-tested components, he said.

Sam Routledge, services director at infrastructure builder Softcat, echoed this sentiment. “I speak to IT directors all day and there are two things they talk about: business continuity and virtualisation,” he said.

“While processing power and disk input/output are important, the most crucial factor is the memory.”