Coding Horror: Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs
blog post about scale up and scale out, and hidden costs introduced by administration licensing costs for proprietary software. "Last monday we upgraded our core database server after a power outage knocked the site offline. I haven't touched this machine since 2005 so it was a major undertaking to do it last minute. We upgraded from a machine with 64 GB of ram and 8 CPUs to a HP ProLiant DL785 with 512 GB of ram and 32 CPUs ..."