> For speed, the X86 32 and 64 bit architectures seem to be noticeable
> faster than Sparc. However, running Linux or BSD on Sparc make them
> pretty fast too, but you lose the fault tolerant support for things like
> hot swappable CPUs or memory.
Agreed.. You can get a Quad Opteron with 16GB memory for around 20K.
Grab 3, a cheap SAN and setup a little master/slave replication with
failover (how is Slony coming?), and you're all set.