I don't get it. Come again?

Buy a bunch of VirtualBox licenses? Because that sounds like it would accomplish what you're talking about. Another thing they could do, assuming they just want to shuffle data around, is make a really big Linux server farm. Wouldn't take much cpu at all to let people shuffle data around over the web.

Now, if they want to process the data while it's still on the server, that's a whole different kettle of fish.