Is memory scarcity slowing your IT performance?
As memory supply tightens, optimize —don’t over-provision.
Memory constraints continue to strain systems and budgets. Visibility and planning help IT teams reduce risk, avoid rushed purchases, and maintain performance despite market constraints.
Memory Price Increases: year-on-year (Q1 '26 vs Q1 '25)
Data source: SHI Sales data via SHI One
We are still seeing ongoing changes and volatility in vendor pricing and quotes.
Act now to stay ahead
Leverage SHI’s expertise to assess your risks and options.
Memory may be scarce.
System performance doesn’t have to be.
Get ahead of price swings and lead times with the visibility and planning needed to keep critical workloads optimized.
SHI helps organizations ease the operational pressure of memory constraints through smarter optimization, better visibility, and lifecycle strategies that protect investments and sustain performance.
The rapid rise of AI workloads is driving a new wave of infrastructure demand, and memory is at the center of it.
As the challenges from memory constraints compound, expertise matters.
SHI can help you address:
- Performance degradation across virtualized, AI, and user workloads.
- Higher costs and unplanned spend from reactive DRAM procurement.
- Delayed AI and digital initiatives as infrastructure struggles to scale efficiently.
- Operational risk from aging assets, uneven refresh cycles, and limited visibility.
Without expert intervention, organizations risk compounding technical debt, higher long-term spend, and reduced competitiveness.
SHI helps organizations move from reactive spending to intelligent optimization — addressing memory constraints holistically.
Data center
- Optimize host and workload placement.
- Rebalance virtualized and AI workloads to restore performance and density.
- Improve lifecycle planning to extend asset value.
Storage
- Improve storage arrays to eliminate latency bottlenecks.
- Reclaim unused capacity and improve data efficiency.
- Scale throughput and capacity to support AI and analytics.
End user
- Intelligently refresh devices based on performance and workload needs.
- Identify opportunities to extend device lifecycles.
- Maintain a consistent user experience across devices.
Network performance
- Modernize what matters and extend what works.
- Gain endtoend visibility to networkdriven memory inefficiencies and risk.
- Optimize network architecture for highthroughput, lowlatency performance.
Benefits
Lower DRAM costs in a volatile market
Optimize memory usage, extend hardware lifecycles, and reclaim unused capacity to reduce unnecessary spend.
Relief from memory pressure without hardware sprawl
Rebalance workloads, optimize storage and network efficiency, and eliminate bottlenecks — without expanding DRAM footprints.
Continuity and risk reduction for critical workloads
Sustain performance and availability for essential workloads despite supply constraints and pricing volatility.
Higher performance and greater stability
Restore low latency across virtualized and AI workloads while increasing VM density and network throughput.
Clear visibility into infrastructure efficiency
Surface actionable insight into utilization, investment priorities, and long-term planning.
Intelligent, value-driven refresh decisions
Align refresh timing to performance needs and memory efficiency — extending asset life and upgrading only where business value is clear.
Solve for today and tomorrow with SHI
Solution
Solution
Assess your infrastructure and end-user readiness.
Get expert guidance from an SHI memory specialist
Get expert guidanceFrequently asked questions
The main drivers are rising demand for AI, analytics, and data-heavy workloads, which limit the supply of traditional DRAM. This leads to higher costs and reduced availability for both enterprises and end users. Learn more about supply chain trends.
Enterprises may experience higher hardware costs, delayed refresh cycles, decreased system performance, and pressure to over-provision DRAM. These are especially true in virtualized or AI-driven environments.
Over-provisioning DRAM increases costs and may hide underlying infrastructure inefficiencies. Instead, focus on optimizing storage performance, improving workload placement, and maximizing existing capacity. These help reduce memory pressure without unnecessary spending.
AI and analytics need fast, efficient memory. Shortages can slow model training, inference, and data processing. Optimizing your infrastructure is key to maintaining high performance.
Yes, you can reduce memory consumption and maintain low-latency performance, often without adding DRAM, by designing efficient storage architectures, rebalancing workloads, and reclaiming unused capacity.
In virtualized environments, poor storage alignment and uneven workload distribution can increase host memory use, limiting VM density and overall efficiency.
Prepare by monitoring memory usage closely, planning hardware lifecycles proactively, benchmarking system performance, and implementing optimization strategies to extend the value of your current hardware.
SHI supports customers by providing lifecycle planning, optimizing storage and workloads, reclaiming unused capacity, and offering data protection services and centralized monitoring.
No, most experts expect ongoing constraints as AI and data usage grow. Long-term planning and optimization are essential for future-proofing your IT environment.