Machine Learning with Apache Spark Quick Start Guide

Vertical scaling

As both your organization's data estate and the number of users requiring access to that data grew, high-performance remote servers would have been utilized, with access provisioned over the corporate network. These remote servers would typically either act as remote filesystems for file sharing or host relational database management systems (RDBMSes) in order to store and manage relational databases. As data requirements grew, these remote servers would have needed to scale vertically, meaning that additional CPU, memory, and/or hard disk space would have been installed. Typically, these relational databases would have stored anything between hundreds and potentially tens of millions of records.