> It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available.
One also has to take into account how many systems that are distributed over n servers have actually n points of failure. My estimate would be "quite a lot".
Very true. It's expensive and complex to have real HA/redundancy, but they can't even bounce a DB server without taking down every one of their apps. I have no idea about administering Windows servers, but based on my experience with Windows Update on the desktop, I would imagine that you need to do that relatively often.
Hopefully they have a staging environment running somewhere internally at least.
One also has to take into account how many systems that are distributed over n servers have actually n points of failure. My estimate would be "quite a lot".