I'm curious what you mean by Postgres not having a "scale-up" strategy. Are you saying that eg MS SQL works better with a few TBs of ram and 128 cores than Postgres does?
Yes. Postgres famously has been single-threaded for queries for a long time. The upcoming version 9.6 is finally introducing some basic parallel scan/join/aggregate functionality.
MS SQL, Oracle and pretty much all the commercial databases are much farther along in scaling up and making the most of a single machine.
MS SQL, Oracle and pretty much all the commercial databases are much farther along in scaling up and making the most of a single machine.