> how many hundred terabytes of data can you get away with the single beefy server You can have multiple petabytes on a single beefy server with excellent perf

> how many hundred terabytes of data can you get away with the single beefy server You can have multiple petabytes on a single beefy server with excellent performance characteristics. This is already a thing. The part of the database that doesn't scale with storage density is cache replacement algorithms, as a matter of theory. There are some problems a cache can't solve. These degrade long before you get to petabytes. If you replace cache replacement architectures with cache admission architectures then things scale just fine. The main reason we use cache replacement architectures is that they are simple to design and understand. They do have fundamental limits though. Right tool for the job and all that.