Well then they are ripping you off, I put together number of these servers with battery backed raid and all can be done for under £250 if you know how to bargain hunt (I did say auction). Of course if you go to a fixed price reseller who might say send soliciting emails to non tech savvy businesses, you might pay over £1000 for a G5 server kitted out with stuff.
The most powerful a DL385 G5 with 2 VT-x capable quad core CPU's, 16GB of ram, a VT1000 quad port network card, a P212 with 512MB BBWC and a P400 with the same, 4 10K 300GB SAS disks, an additional single boot disk for the hypervisor, this cost about £450 a year ago.
The cheapest DL140 chassis without disks I saw sell, had 2 Xeon 5160's and was £50, I've picked up a working P400 from the US for £12, you can even cut costs on the batteries replacing the cell and keeping the management electronics if you really want to.
The only think you need to be careful with is the disks, I've had 1 fail in 18 months from about 15, but I also learnt fast not to buy disks from people with ratings of under 50, and check every disk (3 Ebay cases issuing a refund), as some sellers sell working disks which fail on a full scan (this happened twice)
I've also had one dodgy server which went very cheaply, which I didn't check until it was too late, and all the signs were there that it was bad before I completed the transaction, along with a £12 replacement fan board expense.
Of course, the electricity is another matter.
If you care about the cost of an enterprise iLO license and are using multiple machines, then you can save a bucket load more money than that by buying pre-built usually lightly used entry level servers, replacing the disk infrastructure with something more capable, to build a small datacentre. Now though I expect something with full virtualization support (the i7 Xeons or AMD's not quite equivalents) would be a better target, at probably less than a white box.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
