[southern_cross]

On an individual basis, sure, the smaller systems are more cost effective. But in the aggregate large systems just blow them away, in general.

I know of a local mega corporation which has been steadily moving off of their "expensive" mainframes for the past decade or so, and they're finally almost finished. But now that they have tens of thousands of servers instead, their IT and other related costs have just exploded, to the point where today they're in a rather severe cost-containment mode. This in spite of the fact that they're tried to leverage open source tools and such in order to keep costs down. (Wall Street has started to notice these excessive cost issues, too.) And this doesn't even take into account all of the breakage which has occurred during the transition, leading to the company's good name being heavily smeared these days due to ongoing customer service issues. I suspect that their reputation may never fully recover from this.