> rather than trying to buy a single beefy box to support n users
This sentiment has always felt weird to me, as I have always seen UNIX as an OS that has been designed - from the ground up (in late 1960s) to support multiple concurrent users - whether it is via a serial terminal, and now multi-seat, VNC or an X terminal. By today's standards it's not even such a "beefy box" that can easily do that.
Blame browsers as soon as 3 users wanted to use facebook youtube on your 1200 box each user will probably have a worse experience than 3 users running 400 boxes plus hardware failure would reduce capacity to 0% instead of 1 box failing at a time.
This sentiment has always felt weird to me, as I have always seen UNIX as an OS that has been designed - from the ground up (in late 1960s) to support multiple concurrent users - whether it is via a serial terminal, and now multi-seat, VNC or an X terminal. By today's standards it's not even such a "beefy box" that can easily do that.