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Standard Edition Hardware

Glenn Berry tackles the question of maximizing bang for buck with hardware for SQL Server Standard Edition:

Since SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition has such a low per-instance memory limit, you should purposely choose an appropriate memory configuration that will let you use all of the license-limit memory while also getting the best memory performance possible. Only populating one DIMM per memory channel will give you the absolute best memory performance supported by your processor(s).

The major server vendors, such as Dell, offer detailed guidance on the possible memory configurations for their servers, depending on the number and specific type of processor selected. For SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition in a two-socket server with two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 family processors, choosing eight, 32GB DDR4 DIMMs would give you 256GB of RAM, running at the maximum supported speed of 2400MT/s.

This would allow you to set max server memory (for the buffer pool) to 131,072 MB (128GB), and still have plenty of memory left over for the operating system and for possible use by columnstore indexes and in-memory-OLTP. You would also have sixteen empty DIMM slots that could be used for future RAM expansion (which you could take advantage of if you did a subsequent Edition upgrade to Enterprise Edition). Another use for some of those empty DIMM slots would be for “tail of the log caching” on NVDIMMs (which is supported in SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition with SP1).

Click through for some very helpful advice.  If your budget is tight enough that Enterprise Edition is out of the question, it’d be terrible to pick something which wastes hardware or, even worse, wastes hardware while still forcing you to pay more for licensing.