Pretty much anything. How about a Dell R340 with a dual-10G NIC and some SSDs? That's not commodity, that's cheap, a commodity server would be a dual-Xeon but that's overkill for serving 16gbps.
I think that is the problem with modern day's Web Dev. ( Sorry )
With Cloud and SaaS. They are so abstracted from Hardware that their knowledge on basic hardware and server, everything from CPU, Storage I/O and Network are close to zero.
