[zbobet2012]

Absolutely. Queries on 60TB of data can certainly merit more than one box. Hell, queries on 1TB of data can merit more than one box.

I have a workload that runs close to 1.2million TPS for hours at a time and needs less than 100 millisecond response times at the 99th percentile. That uses more than 1 box and sits (replicated) in RAM.

However, 5TB of data really _isn't_ that much on modern SSD's. You can fit a sizable chunk of that in RAM on a decent server, so you probably _don't_ need more than one box.

I have 5TB of data that needs to sit on an SSD is, to be honest, a really poor performance metric. If you are genuinely specing out hardware and a database a better statement would be:

"I have 5TB of relational data, with a pareto distribution for access, at a peak of 100K TPS". Then we can start talking about what solves the problem.