[jacquesm]

10 servers with 100G will use a lot more power and will require distribution of your algorithm right along with your dataset, so instead of 10 server you will probably end up with a pretty high multiple of 10.

[gonzo41]

Isn't this what the cloud is for?

Surely you just rent an instance of the computing power you need for an hour or two then upload the data, a script and wait.

[jacquesm]

That really depends on your usecase. Not all analysis is 'one-shot' and not all businesses are free to upload their data into 'the cloud'.

[regularfry]

Not only that, but uploading a 1TiB dataset implies a certain quality of connection which not all businesses want to take on...

[lerouxb]

As opposed to 10*100GiB that can be uploaded over a 56.6K modem, right? ;)

[acveilleux]

It's a reasonable cloud vs. on-premise argument. Obviously the scale of the data transfer to a cloud has more to do with the dataset size than the number of instances.

[rspeer]

How often are you planning to do that? The bandwidth it takes to send data that fits in RAM somewhere else is somewhat expensive.