You could also less charitably read that "growth" as using 250 servers to do the same job you previously did with two. I guess that's growth for sever manufacturers, but I'd expect with more powerful hardware we'd need fewer servers, rather than more.
I'm not sure what part of my comment made you draw that conclusion. This was a science team and we used servers mostly for scientific computations. Sysadmins jobs was to operate and maintain the servers e.g. make jobs run, upgrade, patch, fix, etc.
Virtualization massively simplified this, and automation decreased human intervention. With 250 we were definitely running bigger tasks faster e.g. a project that required 3 months of computing now takes 2 weeks instead.
