Navigating the Memory Price Surge: Stability in a Volatile Market
The global IT hardware market is currently facing significant headwinds. With DRAM contract prices almost doubling in early 2026, organisations across the UK are re-evaluating their device procurement and refresh strategies.
To understand how XMA is helping customers maintain stability during this period of volatility, we sat down with our Commercial Director, Paul Hamilton. Paul shares insights into how we use our Tier-1 partnerships and UK-based logistics to provide certainty for Enterprise and Public Sector (CPS) organisations.
How XMA Is Supporting Enterprise and CPS Customers Amid Rising DRAM Costs
Paul Hamilton: “With DRAM contract prices almost doubling in early 2026, many organisations are understandably concerned about the impact on their device procurement and refresh strategies. At XMA, we are taking proactive and measurable steps to help our customers maintain stability, predictability and value during this period of market volatility.”
- Strategic Engagement at Executive Level: “We are in active, ongoing C‑suite dialogue with the world’s largest PC manufacturers. These direct relationships ensure we have early visibility of market movements, production constraints and forthcoming allocation changes enabling us to advocate for our customers at the highest level.”
- Tri‑Party Engagement for Transparency: “Where appropriate, we facilitate tri‑party conversations between customers and our tier 1 vendors. This gives organisations a clear, unfiltered view of the vendor’s position, supply outlook and pricing dynamics. It ensures decisions are informed by real time insights rather than assumptions or market noise.”
- Maximising the Channel Ecosystem: “XMA works across the breadth of the channel ecosystem to secure the best possible availability and inventory positions for our customers. By leveraging our scale, partner status and long standing relationships, we ensure our customers benefit from priority access to the latest stock positions and market intelligence.”
- Secured, Ring‑Fenced Inventory: “For strategic partner accounts, we are already securing and ring‑fencing dedicated inventory in advance. This provides our customers with more predictable planning cycles, reduced exposure to sudden price spikes and assurance that the devices they require will be available when they need them.”
Budget Resilience: Evidence-Based Advice for IT Directors
For IT Directors managing multi-year refresh cycles, what evidence-based advice are we giving to help them demonstrate the ROI of proceeding with upgrades now versus waiting for a price reversal that analysts suggest is unlikely before 2027?
Paul Hamilton: “This discussion extends beyond immediate cost pressures and moves into a broader strategic assessment of organisational resilience and value creation. While rising component prices will influence deployment budgets, the wider geopolitical landscape spanning security threats, productivity demands, and ongoing supply chain volatility means that delaying refresh cycles often introduces greater operational and financial risk.”
“To support IT Directors in demonstrating clear, evidence‑based ROI, XMA partners with customers through structured innovation workshops. These sessions provide up‑to‑date insight on advancements in security, AI‑driven productivity, endpoint performance, and professional services.”
Supply Chain Agility: Strengthening UK Logistics
What specific changes have we made to our UK-based fulfilment and logistics operations to ensure we can still meet “just-in-time” delivery requirements despite global component shortages?
Paul Hamilton: “XMA has taken a series of proactive steps to strengthen our UK‑based fulfilment and logistics operations, ensuring we can continue to meet “just‑in‑time” delivery expectations despite global component shortages.”
“We have worked closely with our Tier 1 vendors to analyse market demand patterns, forecast volatility, and secure forward‑looking inventory positions within our UK logistics facility. By committing to early allocation and ring‑fenced stock, we can protect customers from both sudden availability constraints and unpredictable price fluctuations.”
“In practical terms, this operational model allows us to:
- Hold dedicated inventory locally, enabling reliable next‑day delivery across the UK.
- Reduce the impact of global supply chain disruption, thanks to pre-secured and strategically stored stock.
- Provide greater pricing stability, insulating customers from short-term spikes driven by component scarcity.
- Streamline fulfilment workflows, ensuring devices can be configured, kitted and dispatched rapidly from within the UK.
- Strengthen vendor collaboration, giving us early visibility of constraints and enabling smarter sourcing decisions.”
What Does This Mean For Our Customers?
Navigating market volatility requires more than just reactive purchasing, it demands a partner with the scale and relationships to provide stability. By prioritising forward-looking inventory and direct vendor engagement, XMA ensures your technology roadmaps remain on track despite global component pressures.
Get in touch with your XMA account manager to discuss your upcoming IT projects, or contact us directly at enquiries@xma.co.uk to learn how we can protect your hardware budget.
The AI Capability Gap: Why Procuring Hardware Is Not a Strategy
Artificial Intelligence represents a major wave of technological investment, with 68% of UK enterprises either implementing or planning to implement AI solutions. To meet this demand, the strategies and partner programs of major vendors are heavily influencing the market.
We are seeing a massive shift in infrastructure design across the entire technology stack. Key players like Microsoft, AWS, and Google are embedding complex AI services directly into their cloud environments. For on-premises and hybrid requirements, vendors such as Cisco, HPE, and Dell are releasing infrastructure explicitly built to handle intense AI compute and data storage workloads. Simultaneously, cybersecurity leaders like Fortinet, Sophos, and Palo Alto Networks are adapting their tools to secure these new, rapidly expanding environments.
However, this rush to adopt has created a significant capability gap. Procuring an AI-optimised Dell server, or provisioning advanced machine learning environments within AWS, is a transaction. It is not a strategy. When organisations treat AI as a simple hardware or software upgrade, high-performance systems sit underutilised, integration with legacy systems causes disruption, and a lack of proper governance increases operational risk.
To achieve a measurable return on investment (ROI) and optimise your total cost of ownership (TCO), you need more than capable technology, you need the practical expertise to apply it effectively.
Bridging the Gap Between Procurement and Performance
At XMA, our approach is built on practical understanding. We know that buying the equipment is the easiest part of the process. True operational resilience is established in the post-implementation phase, through rigorous integration, training, and ongoing management.
Here is how we ensure your organisation gets the most out of its infrastructure investments once the hardware is delivered:
- Strategic Integration and Configuration: AI infrastructure rarely exists in a vacuum. Whether you are deploying HPE servers or Cisco networking gear, we ensure your new hardware communicates securely and reliably with your existing legacy systems. We handle the complex configuration required to optimise data flow and prevent operational bottlenecks.
- Governance and Risk Mitigation: Advanced AI capabilities require access to vast amounts of corporate data, which expands your attack surface. We work with our security partners to implement strict identity management and access controls directly into your infrastructure, ensuring you maintain compliance and mitigate security risks.
- Targeted Workforce Training: The most capable infrastructure is a wasted investment if your team does not know how to operate it safely. We provide targeted training programs that give your IT staff the specific skills required to manage, monitor, and maintain your new AI environments, reducing human error.
- Proactive Managed Services: To free your internal team from day-to-day firefighting and allow them to focus on strategy, we provide proactive managed IT services. We monitor your infrastructure to identify and fix issues before they cause costly downtime, ensuring long-term stability.
Focus on Business Outcomes
Technology is a tool that requires an expert hand to deliver results. Simply buying equipment with AI capabilities does not solve business problems.
XMA provides reliable, secure, and affordable managed IT services. We help you modernise infrastructure, scale IT securely, and prove the value of IT to your board. We work with you to ensure your technology investments are fully integrated, properly governed, and actively driving business value.
Contact us at enquiries@xma.co.uk or talk to your XMA Account Manager about our full range of infrastructure capabilities.
The Multi-Framework Strategy: How to Procure a Complete IT Estate Without the Administrative Headache
XMA, Pure Storage and a New Era of Flexibility & Data Resilience for Higher Education
Effective planning, device deployment and management
Making the most of digital workspace transformation – Part 1
As working practices and norms continue to change and develop, and the debate about what works best rages on, the ability to adapt your business’ working methods quickly is growing in value. Of course, quick reactions shouldn’t come at the expense of business collaboration, or security. So, how do you clear this delicate obstacle?
The right technology and processes can make an enormous difference. Modern operating systems and software, such as Windows 10, continues to evolve and offer increased levels of flexibility for businesses and private users alike. The rise of the cloud further boosts this, with remote collaboration now near-seamless, as opposed to just a few years ago, when working from home could be challenging. This rate of development is showing no signs of slowing down.
As long-term partners of Microsoft, and experts in the use of technology like Windows 10, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Azure, we’ve been trusted by many public and private organisations to help prepare them for the challenges presented by changing work habits. We achieve this through a distinct, four-step process we call the digital workspace quadrant.
Getting a sense of what you need to meet your unique needs should always start by taking a closer look at where your business currently stands. What technology do you currently use? How much do you pay for it? Are you using it to its full potential? Programs like Microsoft Teams can offer massive advantages to a business if used properly. We’ll take a close look to see what value can be extracted from existing tools, before looking at new ones.
From here, we’ll start to work with you to define and build your business case for change. To do this effectively, we’ll involve employees from across your business, in order to get a sense of their unique challenges, insights and ideas.
By combining this knowledge gained from your team with comprehensive audits on your technology, infrastructure and existing skillsets, we’ll pick out the ideal technological solutions for your challenges.
From here, our deployment and management expertise comes into play. We’ll make use of deployment tools like Windows Autopilot to ensure any new device delivery goes smoothly, without any setup time necessary.
We’ll also work to make device management significantly simpler. Windows Autopilot enables legacy app containerisation, which allows older Windows apps that are no longer supported to carry on running within the latest version of Windows 10. This means that, if you have an essential piece of bespoke software that’s out of date, you don’t need to immediately replace it, or jeopardise your wider security in the process.
Any technological or cultural change is a big step for a business to take, especially at a time when working culture is evolving so quickly. At XMA, we’ll work with you to make it as simple and painless as possible. From enabling new hybrid opportunities to making the most of existing tech and infrastructure, with our expert support and quality products from major vendors like Microsoft, digital workspace transformation can be that little bit easier.
To learn more about our digital workspace quadrant process, and how we can help you make the most of workplace transformation, keep an eye out for part two of this series, which focuses on keeping security high without restricting access.
Keeping hybrid working secure and staying in control
Making the most of digital workspace transformation – Part 2
As widespread digital workspace transformation continues to progress, and the working standards of individuals and businesses continues to evolve, keeping pace is increasingly important. If a business is behind the curve, it becomes ever more difficult to attract and retain talent. But with the desire for remote and flexible working being higher than ever, how can you meet this need without jeopardising your business security and continuity?
XMA can help you with this. In a previous blog, we looked at how we can use an effective planning and deployment strategy to help your business embrace new ways of working. In this second blog, we’ll be looking into the ways we can help you keep control of your network, without ever laying your hands on the devices your team uses.
When people work remotely, it’s likely that the range of devices available to them will go up. For example, some people might have a powerful PC at home, while others might prefer to work from a personal tablet or phone occasionally. While this boost to staff convenience is hard to ignore, it does raise several major security concerns. As these devices are outside your management control, they could be an ideal access point for hackers and viruses. As a result, many businesses are choosing to restrict access to managed devices only.
Whether you choose to allow a varied range of devices to use your network, or supply specific machines to each member of your team, we can help. Sophisticated endpoint and access management systems, enabled by Windows 10 technology, allow you to retain control while enabling an enormous level of flexibility for your teams. This will let you simplify automated provisioning, configuration management, and software updates for every single device that uses your network, regardless of operating system.
Device management is just part of the battle. Alongside close and customisable control over access, based on your specific needs and wishes, we’ll also develop a robust and personalised data security and risk management policy. This will consider the sensitivity of your data, how much access is required for each individual, and much more.
Using the latest software and zero-trust techniques from Microsoft, including Windows 10 Authenticator for two-factor authentication, we can start to create an environment that enables digital workspace transformation, without jeopardising security for the sake of access.
Enabling cultural change is naturally important for a business, especially right now, but doing it in a way that’s sensible, safe and suitable for you is incredibly important. It’s not something to be rushed, you need to pick the right path for you. Our team will help you to pick the right path, and use the best technology from Microsoft, along with other major vendor partners, to make it a reality.
We’ll be continuing our blog series on digital transformation in the weeks to come, so keep an eye out for part three. If you’ve not read the first part, or would like a reminder, you can find it here
Canterbury Christ Church University
Migration to Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure enables university do more with less.
Canterbury Christ Church University has been able to consolidate its IT infrastructure into just a single rack in each data centre.
Faced with a budget shortfall to refresh servers and storage, Christ Church University was forced to get creative, but found that a hyperconverged solution did more than just solve its cost conundrum.
How did the Covid-19 lockdown impact sustainability?
The conversation around the shift to remote working is constantly ongoing, and we have all seen first-hand the positive impacts on businesses. This includes anything from improved collaboration and productivity, through to better mental health and wellbeing. Technology has been a key enabler in supporting the move to remote working.
Technology adopted during lockdown to enable employees to work remotely has shaped not just organisations during lockdown, but strategic business planning moving forward. We have already seen announcements from large enterprise technology organisations, shifting their working model to remote, either entirely or in part.
The productivity benefits of working from home centre around the loss of the need to commute. With the average person’s work commute at 60 minutes each way, this has saved on average a staggering 10 hours per week spent mostly in the car, on the train or bus. As a result of this, the European Environment Agency’s data confirms large decreases in air pollutant concentrations, of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations, largely due to reduced traffic and other activities, especially in major cities under lockdown measures.
Reductions of around half have been seen in some locations, for example:
- In Milan, average concentrations of NO2 for the past month have been at least 24 % lower than the month prior. The average concentration during the week of 16-22 March was 21 % lower than for the same week in 2019.
- In Rome, average NO2 concentrations for the past four weeks were 26-35 % lower than for the same weeks in 2019.
- In Barcelona, average NO2 levels went down by 40 % from one week to the next. Compared with the same week in 2019, the reduction was 55 %.
- In Madrid, average NO2 levels went down by 56 % from one week to the next. Compared with the same week in 2019, the reduction was 41 %.
- In Lisbon, average NO2 levels went down by 40 % from one week to the next. Compared with the same week in 2019, the reduction was 51 %.
(European Environment Agency, 2020).
After achieving and analysing this reduction in pollution, will the Covid-19 lockdown result in real progress to tackle climate change?
Whilst addressing long-term air quality problems requires ambitious policies and forward-looking investments, the Covid-19 lockdown demonstrated the capability we must vastly reduce our emissions. When the noise of airplanes and traffic was gone, it helped us understand and have empathy for the effects of climate change on future generations. The lockdown also demonstrated to employers that employees can effectively work from anywhere with best placed technology, and in turn contribute toward a greener and more sustainable future.
Is your business set up for remote working?
XMA have been supporting businesses throughout Covid-19 to achieve efficient digital workspaces. Get in touch to discuss your Digital Workspace now.
Reference: European Environment Agency (2020). Air Pollution. Available at: https://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/air-pollution-goes-down-as [Accessed: 24.08.2020]
Cloud Physics: An analytics-driven approach to managing infrastructure
A New Approach
In today’s world of software-defined datacenters, infrastructure is increasingly complex and change is constant. The potential for change-related risk to applications is greater than ever before. In spite of the abundance of tools available, IT administrators lack the ability – and time – to study all the known or unknown configuration issues in their vSphere infrastructure. They struggle to understand whether changes – intended or accidental – result in smoldering performance and availability issues waiting to ignite.
Further, when things go wrong, there’s an inability to replay the changes over time to correlate events or trends that caused the current problem. This creates a significant drag on administrator effectiveness especially as they are thrown into firefighting mode to minimize the impact of unexpected application disruption and related costs.
The goal of CloudPhysics is to provide organisations with an analytics-driven approach to managing infrastructure that enables administrators to preempt emerging hazards and gives them the confidence to act boldly to reduce risk and waste in their vSphere environments.
To learn more , please fill in your details below to receive a free copy of the CloudPhysics whitepaper.
Everything you need to know about dHCI…
XMA’s Infrastructure Solutions Team are seeing a growing interest in dHCI from HPE.
XMA Solutions Director for Infrastructure – Jen Norman – and her team of Datacentre Architects take a closer look..
We’ve been designing and installing Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions for some time now, and between Myself and my Datacentre team we have over (*cough) 115 years (*ahem) engineering experience between us. So when HPE came to us with a disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure solution last year, apart from repeating the name several times over to ourselves, we got onboard and got involved. Now we are privileged to have completed our first dHCI live production solution deployments earlier this year.
What could you be facing?
So maybe your VMware system is running out of storage capacity, your servers are dated and you can’t upgrade to run the latest versions.
Ok. Well you’ve done some research and investigation. You want a hyperconverged replacement where you can run concurrent workloads, and like the idea of being able to scale out storage or compute separately. BUT it would be great if you could get this delivered, supported and managed as a single product.
What else might you need?
Well as standard, you want a storage system that has options for encryption, compression and deduplication, application consistent snapshots and advanced replication (ether synchronous or asynchronous) with near all-flash speed and sub-ms latency for always-on apps. That’s a given.
Definitely VMware clusters running on the latest compatible server hardware and block level storage.
A complete turnkey solution? One that is monitored from the application to the storage, proactive alerting and with the ability to predict and prevent infrastructure problems before they happen.
Nothing less than a system designed for 99.9999% availability – no single point of failure, hardware redundancies with the ability to tolerate 3 simultaneous drive failures!
And you’re pretty sure that Procurement will want the choice on finance options – including future proofing, cloud like financing, with integrated support.
Then you definitely need a HPE disaggregated hyperconverged solution (dHCI)
And you are not alone. Since its inception in 2019 we have seen successful installations in Local Government and Education, with interest and opportunities growing in the Corporate, Commercial Enterprise and Healthcare sectors.
It’s a winning combination
You take the power and performance of the HPE Nimble Storage array, with its self-managing flash storage.
Add industry-leading HPE ProLiant Servers, include HPE storage switches, and deploy VMware vSphere.
Then this is all preconfigured as a turnkey solution!
Then automate with full-stack intelligence and policy-based automation for VM-centric management.
But here’s the best bit……
Add the power of HPE InfoSight over all this, and you have full-stack predictive analytics and support automation working for you that predicts and prevents issues. Infosight auto-routes any complex issue directly to L3 HPE Nimble support.
HPE have streamlined their support portfolio to offer four service levels that are easier to understand, easier to align to business needs which gives you visibility into IT assets and support status from anywhere.
You can flexibility and independently grow compute and/or storage – adding new dHCI compatible storage and/or servers when required – for scale-out upgrades that are non-disruptive and transparent to applications.
Eliminate over provisioning and add only the resources when needed. The Timeless Storage means no worries today or tomorrow with all-inclusive software licensing, flat support pricing, no forklift upgrades, and an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years with Timeless Storage.
And, if you’re reading this thinking ‘well this sounds great but I’ve still got Gen9 (or 10) Proliant servers that are in warranty and I don’t want to replace them yet’.. Well HPE read your mind, (just kidding, they leave that to your home speaker system and asked Alexa what you thought), and have designed the solution so you can use the existing compute you already have in place, add a Nimble array and the dHCI software allowing you to convert everything in to a dHCI solution!
Is this Complex?
HPE Nimble storage arrays can be installed and be up and running in half a day requiring no external tools or software – we have completed installations where the HPE Nimble arrays that have been physically installed, configured, integrated and have test VMs running within hours ready for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). They can be All-Flash (AF) or Adaptive Flash (HF) for mixed, mainstream workloads, where cost-efficient flash performance is important. It is a Secondary Flash array for backup and DR while allowing you to put your backup data to work.
For the compute you have the HPE ProLiant Gen10 DL360 a performance driven dense server or DL380 for performance and expandability. These servers deliver security, agility and flexibility without compromise – with the knowledge that you can confidently deploy for virtualisation.
These are completed with a choice of Ethernet HPE storage switches to meet your budget and installation size.
Root Cause…. Could it be the network? A server fault or a storage fault?
Once installed HPE InfoSight can help you stop spending days searching for a root cause deep in your hybrid environment. Every second, HPE InfoSight collects and analyses data from more than 100,000 systems worldwide, and uses that intelligence to make every system smarter and more self-sufficient. The result? HPE InfoSight predicts and automatically resolves 86% of customer issues.
Where to go for more information:
HPE dHCI
Why choose XMA?
We are an HPE Platinum partner and have trained and Certified HPE sales and engineers with Master Accredited Solutions Experts (top-level credential validates technical skills) with experience in building and sizing advanced enterprise systems. Continually staying up to date with the latest technology updates, strategies and programs. One of our core values is “customer focus”. We put our customers at the heart of everything we do. We don’t just provide technology we provide solutions.
Written by Jennifer Norman, Solutions Director for Infrastructure
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