I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.
That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.
I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.
Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-class systems with Oracle. Yeuch, and that turned me to open source.
I do remember some $100k - $300k invoices for larger SMP servers from HP, Sun, and the like. For machines that probably had less overall horsepower than my current cell phone :)
It had about as much go as one of those "big slab" xeon slot CPUs at the time which was 1/10th of the cost.
It took Linux and commodity servers a while to kill the $100k+/each proprietary unix server market.
I get that Veritas also did logical volume, raid and so on and that was a guenuine value added at the time. But so many box I saw had veritas so they could partition and get a file system that was OK with 36GB+ monster SCSI disks.
When you have a 100k+ machine it makes more sense, when you can just rebuild a new instance it makes less sense. I do NOT miss using it, but it was nice for its niche.