Comment by jandrewrogers

As a technical nit, the 64-bit AMD Opteron was released in 2003, not late 2000s. It almost immediately took over the low- to mid-range server market and HPC market because nothing could touch its performance and scalability for the price. It was a state-of-the-art design for the time and relatively cheap, same vibes as the Apple M1 release.

People still used the big mainframe-y UNIX servers but their usage shrunk and you could see the writing on the wall. I was already replacing Sparc database servers with Opterons in 2004. The hardware wasn’t as gold-plated but they were fast and workloads were already outgrowing the biggest mainframe-y servers.

TBH, a lot of the gold-plated “enterprise” hardware failed far more often in practice than you would expect, including unrecoverable hard failures. That was a common enough experience that it probably detracted from the sales pitch for that extremely expensive hardware.