Doubling Server Capacity for Gaming

For gaming infrastructure teams, one of the fastest ways to hit a scaling wall is memory. As workloads grow and server fleets expand, adding more capacity usually means buying more DRAM—which is often one of the most expensive parts of the server.

But what if the path to 2X more memory capacity did NOT require 2X the DRAM spend?

That is the opportunity MEXT created for this gaming hosting company.

The customer’s existing environment consisted of servers with 8 nodes each, where every node was configured with 256GB of DRAM. They then reduced DRAM in each node by 50%—from 256GB down to 128GB—to free up 5TB of DRAM. These 5 TB were then populated across 5 net-new servers (without memory in them).

The result? 10 servers total, no changes to the existing DRAM footprint, but 2X the effective memory capacity with MEXT (10TB)! And the only purchases required were the net-new empty-DRAM servers (very cost-effective) plus MEXT software licensing ($126K for 3-years, including enterprise support). This is a relatively small investment compared with the alternative of purchasing 5 additional TB of new DRAM!

At rack scale, the same logic becomes even more compelling. A standard deployment with 240 nodes at 512GB per node delivers 120TB of DRAM across 12 racks. If each node’s DRAM is cut in half and those recovered DIMMs are used to populate additional systems, the organization can theoretically double node count to 480 and double total deployed memory capacity to 240TB—without needing to buy all-new memory for every added server.

The bottom line: MEXT changes the economics of infrastructure expansion. Instead of treating DRAM as a hard scaling limit, organizations can redistribute existing memory, reduce per-node DRAM requirements, and use MEXT to maintain performance while dramatically increasing the number of usable servers in the fleet.