Soft and hardware for manipulating multi-million record data sets If starting from scratch, what hardware and software would be ideal and under \$5k or \$10k for manipulating a data set of 10 to 20 million records without slowing to the crashing point or taking several hours to complete? Manipulation, if it matters, means multivariate regression (simple OLS with less than a dozen variables), basic graphs, and tables.
Use vowpal wabbit for building your regression or classification models. It'll train at the speed at which you can read your data 


Use pandas and dask for plotting graphs etc.
You can use an AWS i2.8xlarge or equivalent machine which will cost you ~ USD 6k for an year