Think of the cache pyramid.[0] Latency may be higher, but if there is enough work / data then it's still efficient to do work remotely / put data farther away.

Think of the cache pyramid.[0] Latency may be higher, but if there is enough work / data then it's still efficient to do work remotely / put data farther away. From what I understand, the article is about two things: 1. Hot swappable components. Oversimplified, but imagine being able to add / remove CPU and RAM to your server like you can with disk space and USB thumb drives. 2. Shareable resources / load balancing. If one server is using all its CPU and another is using all its RAM, they can now use each other's resources. You know how AWS is on-demand, scalable computing? This is the same thing but at a hardware level with CPU, RAM, disk, and network resources. [0]: http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/computer-memory-pyramid.gif http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/computer-memory-pyramid.gif