There is a lot wrong with this article, including, no definition of what "commodity hardware" means.

Would it have been that difficult to show how to run "openssl speed aes -multi 4" or whatnot so people could test on their own hardware?

Perhaps the recognition that even older hardware such as the quad core Opteron 2358 I tested on, delivers 350Mbytes/sec of AES256, would tend to undermine their argument.

350Mbytes/second of network throughput is roughly 3.5 Gbits/second (I usually multiple bytes * 10 to account for overhead); far beyond what most people would ever ask of a single server.

(this same hw does 900+ RSA 2048 bit signs/s, just for reference)