"It's not like 525GB of disk is that expensive these days"
Have you priced 15k RPM SCSI drives recently? That system has 19 of them...
HP gets almost $1400 a piece for the 73 gig drives and the VA7100 alone sells for $25k without any drives at all. HP probably gets $400 or $500 per drive. So if you consider over $30k to be cheap...