Scale-up vs scale-out for Hadoop
Raja Appuswamy, Christos Gkantsidis, Dushyanth Narayanan, Orion Hodson, Antony I.T. Rowstron · 2013
In the last decade we have seen a huge deployment of cheap clusters to run data analytics workloads. The conventional wisdom in industry and academia is that scaling out using a cluster of commodity machines is better for these workloads than scaling up by adding more resources to a single server. Popular analytics infrastructures such as Hadoop are aimed at such a cluster scale-out environment.