I really love the idea of explaining the actor model as tons of tiny little servers compared to a single monolithic server. I tried to make the same comparison recently when I talked about adding distributed transactions to CurioDB (Redis clone built with Scala/Akka): http://blog.jupo.org/2016/01/28/distributed-transactions-in-...
If each key/value in the DB is treated as distributed (as per the actor model), a lot of the limitations Redis faces in a distributed environment are solved. I wrote a lot more about it here: http://blog.jupo.org/2015/07/08/curiodb-a-distributed-persis...