My thought on this is we've all been trained to follow the Google approach: thousands of machines, horizontally scalable, to handle any load. But this model wa

My thought on this is we've all been trained to follow the Google approach: thousands of machines, horizontally scalable, to handle any load. But this model was developed in 2004 when they wanted to hold the entire web in memory and could afford the enormous hardware outlay. Computers are so powerful now this may be the wrong instinct. You can mind boggling amounts of processing for say... $30,000 in hardware, and even with redundancy it would be much simpler to manage.