There are other advantages that typically come with a Big Iron type setup. They tend to have a combination of hot-swap RAM, CPUs, and IO cards, as well as more

There are other advantages that typically come with a Big Iron type setup. They tend to have a combination of hot-swap RAM, CPUs, and IO cards, as well as more extensive circuitry to detect when a piece of hardware has failed, such as having CPUs and/or RAM operate in lockstep. With real big iron, they'll have hot spare processors that will automatically activate, plus make a service call to the hardware vendor to tell them to come and swap out the bad module. That SQL appliance will work come hell or high water, which is something that horizontal systems still have trouble with from time to time.