I just spent the last couple of days standing next to this bad boy:
The only moving parts are the fans, although they did make a bit of a racket
. A lot of enterprise-class SSDs in there (12TB each I think) making up the storage capacity.
Not quite as 'big' in absolute terms as the OP's data centre VM capacity, however to cram this much database performance into a single cabinet is
Of course, this single cabinet is pretty small (in storage capacity terms at least) when compared to many Teradata customer installations (which run to many PB) but it definitely represents 'bleeding-edge' in terms of database performance - and of course can scale linearly as far you like by adding more nodes/cabinets.