The customer hardware is IBM xSeries (3950's), with modular, stackable components, much like a stack of switches. It could be broken up into smaller servers and re-used on other projects.
At the time, IBM, Unisys and Bull were about the only vendors with SQL 2000 capable servers with > 8 CPU's. (And Itanium, of course.)
The customer purchased IBM x460's, 16 CPU's, 64GB RAM = $225k each in 2005, right after they came out. Three required (active, passive in a cluster at the production site and one for the DR hot site). Upgrade them to dual core x3950's six months later = another 200K (or so, the upgrade was to 16 dual cores, 128BG RAM for each of the three database servers ). Plus all the odd's and ends, like 60 amp 3 phase power, 70,000 btu's of cooling, etc.
The software/licensing/support costs were because with > 8 sockets, you needed Microsoft Data Center Edition, and at that time, it came with an expensive support contract ($70k/yr).
Had the vendor been about 6 or 12 months ahead on their optimization, the 16 CPU x460's could have been 8 dual cores instead, and the 32 core upgrade probably wouldn't have been needed - or if it was, it could have been delayed until quad cores were available, the expensive OS support would not have been needed, half as many Microsoft SQL Enterprise CPU licenses would have been needed, and the 24x7 hardware maint contracts would have been half as much, etc.
The customer hardware is IBM xSeries (3950's), with modular, stackable components, much like a stack of switches. It could be broken up into smaller servers and re-used on other projects.