Currently we have about 8 or so in-house servers, all of which are Dell towers. We've never needed to upgrade them in a way other than more memory or a HD swap. There’s a 10 foot wide or so rack system that everything is on (servers, network hardware etc.) and it’s taking up a fair amount of space which is pretty limited in our office.
We're going to be upgrading two of the servers (backup and dev. web). What I'm wondering about is if there's any reason I should go for rack mounted or stick with towers. We don’t have a rack to put them in and I don’t see us getting one for awhile. My thinking is that it’s worth planning now so we can change over later, but I’m not sure if it’s ok to just stack rack mounted systems on each other, if there’s a real price difference that would make towers better or even something else I'm not thinking of. Our 2 newest Dell towers can be rack mounted if we got the hardware for it I think.