Memory Arms Race?
Looks like the race to low power between DRAM and SSD/Flash is getting exciting. Assuming that the early adopter premium goes away quickly, the cost per VM in a dual 16 or 12-core systems is going to drop a lot, and the ability to crank to 196GB of DRAM per U means 4x the VMs of a typical system today.
Flash for VM images makes sense, but we will have achieved storage IO starvation for operating traffic. I've been saying for some years that we will run into an IO wall. 2012 is when it happens!
Flash cache and other tricks are not enough to speed things up. We'll need some new transfer constructs and storage paradigms to move on.