And exactly to his point - you still can't treat these as one uniform huge memory / computational space for your application (these machines seem designed for virtualization rather than one huge application). You run into the same distributed computing issues you would with your own hardware, just with a 5/10x larger initial investment and without a huge amount of pricing control / flexibility in terms of adding capacity / dealing with failures as they arise.

Actually you can treat these as one uniform huge memory / computational space for your application. They're not meant only for virtualisation. In particular, the Oracle Database is a perfect fit for a system with thousands of cores and terabytes of memory.

It's true that for some use cases, you'd be better off carving it up using some form of virtualisation, but it isn't a requirement to reap the benefits of a massive system.

Both the Solaris scheduler and virtual memory system are designed for the kind of scalability needed when working with thousands of cores and terabytes of memory.

You also don't run into the same distributed system issues when you use the system that way.

You also do actually have a fair amount of flexibility in dealing with failures as they arise. Solaris has extensive support for DR (Dynamic Reconfiguration). In short, CPUs can be hot-swapped if needed, and memory can also be removed or added dynamically.