Long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I replaced the need for N * (Oracle license + Sun server) with a simple perl script (< 100 lines) and one Sun server for a total cost saving in $300M+ / year. While doing it, I also invented map-reduce (it was before Google time).
The problem was to calculate bunch of stats from web servers logs (e.g. 10 most popular pages). The original solution was loading it all into Oracle database running on multiple servers since logs were huge. And then running bunch of SQL queries. Rinse and repeat daily.
