For what it's worth...
Admittedly I'm out of the mainstream of business IT these days. I have a selection of individuals and small business clients. But over the past 5 or so years I've seen the need for a small server solution disappear with the rise of adaptable and cheap NAS boxes. The mantra 'RAID is not a back up solution' may well be true to a professional, but for most people they see it as a cheap and easy form of data storage - fit and forget. Back up for the RAID often consists of a large capacity USB drive that someone takes home.
Whenever I can get them to discuss back up or cloud storage they quickly realise that having it all in the cloud is not a truly viable solution. In parts of the central and west end of London it's still not possible to get broadband speeds greater than 5 or 6 Mbps - the disgraceful legacy of underinvestment by the our useless government(s) and the lies put out by BT talking about 'superfast'. Telling clients that it'll take a two hours to download a single file is clearly not an option, let alone a complete back up.
For myself five years ago I bought a 2 bay NAS (Synology) to trial out at home. Starting out testing it as small file server and backup for my own computer, it's now central as media server and backup for all the computers in use in the house. And I'm not even using half of it's capability. It's getting a bit full now but upgrading the disks is simple and cheap.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
