Vendors slammed for high server memory pricing

Memory firm Kingston Technology has lambasted vendors for selling overpriced memory for servers and has introduced a scheme to undercut prices for large corporate purchasers.

According to Jackie Barrera, server business manager for Kingston Europe, large corporations can pay several times the price they need when buying memory for servers.

Often, she said, the buyers believe that installing non-vendor memory is a breach of warranty but that is not the case.

She said that as part of its European "platinum" scheme for corporations buying over £100,000 of memory a year, Kingston would guarantee immediate 24/7 replacement of its memory modules and also refund any installation and service cost incurred.

Of course, Kingston is interested in flogging more memory but, said Barrera, corporate end users were needlessly paying over the odds for server memory, whether it be for the x86, Sun, IBM or Alpha platforms.

Kingston only has around 20 per cent of the memory upgrade market for servers, so the reasons for it to want to plunder the corporate treasure house of riches is clear enough.

She said that it was likely that the "platinum" scheme would be followed, if successful, by "gold" and "silver" schemes.

To see how these "platinum" schemes work, readers could do no worse than to point their browser to our own goldbrick scam, er sorry scheme. ®