- Cloud Networking
How to Set Up VPN Tunnels with Cisco Meraki MX
11 Mar, 2026







£4583.44 inc. VAT
AI-generated summary
For the price, an **ASUS ESC4000A-E12** in **2U SP5** format is only a sensible buy if you already know your workloads genuinely benefit from that platform and you’ve got a reason not to just go with a more mainstream server choice. In the real world, rack servers at this level are less about “specs on paper” and more about reliability, management experience, and how smoothly it fits into your existing stack. ASUS can be strong on manageability and build quality, but this kind of spend needs careful checking of what you’ll actually run day-to-day—especially storage, networking, and any heavy virtualization or compute patterns you’re targeting.
Who should buy it: **IT teams rolling out a dedicated compute box** for consistent, predictable workloads, or businesses that prefer ASUS hardware and have standardized on their ecosystem for spares/support. Who should be cautious: anyone who’s buying “just because it’s a server” or expecting good value without doing a proper like-for-like comparison—because at **£3,819 ex-VAT**, small differences in total configuration, support terms, and upgrade paths can swing the ROI fast. If you can’t justify the platform choice with your workload mix, I’d be looking at alternatives from vendors that offer better price/performance at the same size and support maturity in the UK market.

Lenovo
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR250 V3 7DCL - Server - rack-mountable 1U - 1-way - 1 x Xeon 6353P / up to 5.4 GHz - RAM 32 GB - hot-swap 2.5" bay(s) - no HDD - Matrox G200 - Gigabit Ethernet - no OS - monitor: none

Asus
RS720A-E12-RS24/10G/2.6kW/16NVMe

Asus
RS520A-E12-RS24U/1G/1.6kW/16NVMe/RH/OCP/

Asus
RS501A-E12-RS4U/1G/1.6KW/4NVMe/