[foobarian]

Don't those computers cost a lot? Like $10k per blade? Granted it's probably amortized but still...

On the other hand the Redshift cluster doesn't run itself, despite what Amazon says. You still need at least a part time DBA guy.

[eitland]

Last time I worked with physical servers the rule was to avoid blades and run rackmount until space or termal was an issue.

And as long as you were not into GPUs you could get some really decent HP servers at somewhere around $2000 - $7000 depending on your storage needs.