Cases and Enclosures
Servers are available in a variety of enclosures. At first, servers were enclosed in large towers in order to appeal to customers expecting something similar to minicomputers. Nowadays, servers are sold in rack-mountable cases or blades.
If you have to manage many servers, then a rackmount or blade solution makes sense since those solutions take up less space and are easier to manage in terms of cables, keyboards, and displays (see AnandTech's guide for more info). If you only maintain a few, non-redundant servers, than traditional cases make more sense since you'll need easy access to the server's components in order to maintain them. If possible, try out a case before committing to one. See if it's easy to open and replace components. Also, vendors tend to go overboard with screws. Just use enough to keep things in place. You probably won't be moving your server around very much.
In their early days, Google had an innovative approach- their servers had no cases (see NY Times article). Components were held in place with velcro so it would be easy to swap out parts. If you should opt for this solution, than you should put your servers into a separate, well-ventilated room (no case means no electromagnetic shielding).
Temperature control
Some components can get very hot. Left unchecked, the server could perform erratically or become damaged. The easiest and most popular way to keep servers cool is with fans. Cases normally come with fans built-in. Components that get especially warm should either use a heatsink or an onboard fan to stay cool. Fans and heatsinks only work if the room is cool, however. If your servers are kept in an unventilated space, then you'll need cool the room too. Please read Wikipedia's entry on computer cooling for more information.
It is important to monitor the temperature of your server. SNMP software combined with built-in temperature sensors can allow you to remotely monitor your server. If this is not possible, then you can install a digital PC thermometer in one of your server's drive bays (look up "drive bay thermometer" on your favorite search engine) and check it periodically.
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