I mainly work on the smaller side of servers, so you would be looking at Intel Xeon or i7 2.8-3.2 GHz (4-8 cores), 16-32 GB RAM, Windows Server 2008, a 100+ GB SSDs in RAID, 1 TB HDD, with nightly backups. Interestingly, management analytics applications can handle longer downtime than operational systems, so a full system restore from the nightly backup is an acceptable process. Data can recovery can just be performed without downtime, with background processes and zero-downtime database updates.

Interesting. Especially them doing a nightly restore. Many forget to ensure the restore process will work as well as the backup. That company will probably have no problem there. :)

The restore is only as-needed, but full system image backups are made every night.

Ah OK. It was too original and extreme to be true. :)