What I found most interesting was in the Update to the POF article where Jeff Atwood compares the cost of scaling up (as POF did) vs. scaling out (as Atwood does) and notes the comparison of 1 heavy DB server vs its equivalent cost of approximately 83 commodity boxes.
The article factors in hardware and software licensing, but completely overlooks the cost of system administration. With the base cost of $100,000 used in the comparison, that's only a minor part of the price point vs. hiring the head count needed to administer 83 commodity servers, which I could reasonably see requiring a few FTEs if they performed their own hardware support.
The article factors in hardware and software licensing, but completely overlooks the cost of system administration. With the base cost of $100,000 used in the comparison, that's only a minor part of the price point vs. hiring the head count needed to administer 83 commodity servers, which I could reasonably see requiring a few FTEs if they performed their own hardware support.