Why would you buy SGI's UV2K versus say a cluster of Dell R720s or HP DL980s?
Admittedly SGI's big iron box can do a lot more compute in one single server, but for IT shops is this going to be enough to move away from scale-out Dell boxes or even the large-ish DL980s?
In today's virtualization era, would it make sense to deploy a single scale-up server and then sub-divide it for virtualization needs? Will virtualization be as effective on the large scale-up servers as it would on smaller servers. Management would be simple since you have 1 physical host, but it doesn't seem like the cost / benefit would be there.
Would love to hear from some of the vendors. Apart from large databases and HPC, are the large SMP/NUMA boxes going the way of the Concorde for general purpose IT?