> Back in the days pre-Nehalem, the big eight socket 32-core servers were all the rage, but today not so much, and unless a company is willing to spend $250k+ (before support contracts or DRAM/NAND) on a single 8-socket system, it’s reserved for the big players in town. Today, those are the cloud providers.
SAP HANA is a major driver for single servers with the maximum number of cores and maximum memory per core that Intel supports. This is true for on-premise as well as Azure [1] and AWS [2] IaaS.
I think of it as commodity scale-up and the superior price-per-performance applies to any hybrid in-memory column store though HANA seems to be the only offering that exploits this approach. You can store a lot of data in 24 TB (or more) of in-memory compressed bitmap indexes.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/work...