It's a bit frustrating, but they are very stuck in the 70's that way...but they give IT a decent budget so I cant complain too much
In a given night we will back up about 10tb of data to our backup systems in another building across site.
Although, to be honest, I'd happily run iScsi if 10Gig cards&switches werent so damned expensive. I'll wait another year or two. Our main systems run Centos, but exchange/AD/terminal services are all members of the 2008 R2 flavour. All on esxi 4.1. I would likely curl up in a ball and die without vmware/veeam backup&replication. We previously ran hyper-v server as our hypervisor for our systems and they ran like dogs. Switched to ESXI 4.1 and it was like getting a free upgrade. I suspect that in another year or two when XEN/KVM are a little more matured/tested etc, you'll start to see larger scale admins (like myself) pushing new machines off to xen/kvm and slowly letting the old machines die off.
amazon has gpu instances
for raw horsepower on the short - medium term, use AWS http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
ec2 should do well for this, imho
I'm the sysadmin at a medium sized company, and we just ordered a bunch of USED 7206VXR's with NPE400's. Why? Because they're $1300 each and they haul ass & handle MPLS and VOICE. I'm happy with that for the price.
I aplogize if I've misread, but something just doesnt seem to add up here.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!