I think there are huge differences in the server market. Head over to Dell's website, and you can find a tower "server" for under 300 pounds! Alternatively, you can spend more than that on just a hardware RAID card. Our servers general cost about 4000 pounds. We also pay extra for a 4-hour response time.

It is debatable whether a server for 300 pounds is better value that a server for 4000 pounds. With a full VMware Infrastructure/vSphere, with auto-failover, you could argue that you should just have racks of cheap servers, and swap them out when they break.

Andy