I was at Linux.conf.au and saw the talk by the company that deployed the system

1. The school is projected to grow to 1500 pupils over the next few years

2. The server room thing was the standard said they needed 8 racks of servers, instead they just needed 4 servers taking up less than half a rack.

There were a bunch of articles a few months ago about the same sort of thing:

Like this one which includes a link to a paper from 2005 with the same idea.