Sometimes you have a workload that really isn&#x27;t a fit for virtualization&#x2F;containers&#x2F;whatever the latest Rails hotness is, <i>at all</i>, and you just need to throw a couple of cargo trailers of insanely massively-spec&#x27;d servers at the problem.  In those cases, your &#x27;old school&#x27; server provisioning toolkit had better be on-point.<p>It&#x27;s easy to forget just how ridiculously powerful bare iron is these days.  Go to Dell.com and see how much RAM you can cram into a U or three or four today in 2015.  Or see how many IOPS a modern NetApp or Symmetrix (EMC) can push with &#x27;flashcache&#x27; or million-dollar SSDs.  It is <i>ridiculous</i>, and while a lot of those platforms are meant for &#x27;building your own private cloud&#x27;, etc, there&#x27;s a non-trivial amount of workloads&#x2F;projects where bare-iron is the best tool for the job.