I faintly remember when around the turn of the century the Irish equivalent, HEANET put in an Intel Itanic server for a similar purpose (or was it two?). I hope someone will correct me if I remember wrong but it had an absurd amount of memory, like 32GB.
> The main server is a Sun4/630MP-41 with (14-Feb-94) over 20GB GB archive disk space
https://web.archive.org/web/19961105014909/http://nic.funet....