You sound like a desktop user, but a server environment, if done properly, is kind of the opposite. Anything important is part of a pool. Rebuilding, with cob

You sound like a desktop user, but a server environment, if done properly, is kind of the opposite. Anything important is part of a pool. Rebuilding, with cobbler + puppet, should take 10 minutes depending on your hardware and network, plus app files. This is all trivial when weighed against the speed and to a lesser extent, power savings you get with SSDs.