In 2014 I was at Oracle Open World. A 3rd party hardware vendor was saying (and having customers) for Hadoop "clusters" that had 8 cpu cores. Basically their pitch was that Oracle Hardware (ex sun) started at a dense full rack of about a 1 million USD or so, but with the 3d party you could have a hadoop "cluster" in 2U and for 20K. The oracle thing was actually quite price competitive at the time, if you needed hadoop. The 3rd party thing was overpriced for what it was.
Yet, I am sure that 3rd party hardware vendor made out like bandits.
