At one previous employer, the cost of failure could potentially reach $15,750 per HOUR in an extreme case, and this wasn't that large a business.

Any executive who sweats the cost of failsafe hardware and its trivial electrical demand is to my mind, an idiot. Our IT manager had older equipment as completely redundant servers, which could be brought online in short order. Was she paranoid, or wasteful ?

Not to my mind. Very practical considering the cost of failure. I'd recommend her approach any day.