The "rainy day memory pool" is interesting, I've run into something similar in the web-programming context. I used to work for a company that had a horrific ha

The "rainy day memory pool" is interesting, I've run into something similar in the web-programming context. I used to work for a company that had a horrific hardware requisition policy. If your team needed a server, it had to go through a lengthy and annoying approvals process - and even then, it took months before Infrastructure would actually provide said servers. In other words, when a project gets handed down from above to launch in, say, 3 months, there's no way in hell you can get the servers requisitioned, approved, and installed in that time. It became standard practice for each team to slightly over-request server capacity with each project and throwing the excess hosts into a rainy day pool, immediately available and repurposeable as required. New servers will still get requested for these projects, but since they took so long to approve, odds are they'd go right into the pool whenever they actually arrived, which sometimes took up to a year. Of course, it was horrifyingly inefficient. Just on my team alone I think we had easily 50 boxes sitting around doing nothing (and powered on to boot) waiting to pick up the slack of a horrendously broken bureaucracy.