#1, the full article does explain that it's talking about non-clustered performance and that MS has done well on clusters. It's disappointing that the headline and opening paragraph don't mention this, but that's not uncommon for any news article. If it wasn't, Jay Leno would run out of material for his Headlines bit.
I have to admit, in the real world, few mortals have the ability to configure and manage the kinds of clusters that MS has been submitting to TPC-C. In theory, the organizations that are trying to implement this level of performance with SQL Server should have a Premier contract and a TAM who can bring MCS in to help. But that still only covers the software side. For the kind of attention you need to get from a hardware vendor, the price of those commodity clusters isn't going to do it. You have to buy big iron with big margin, hence the need for MS to address non-clustered configurations.
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