Just for giggles...

What happens if (not this EVER happens) your Network guys MOVE the network segment that your box is on and forget to tell you?

I know this from experience.  Not only did they MOVE the segment and change the IP of the server they didn't tell any.

We used 2 different NICs in the server 1 for users to connect and the other for backups and talking to other servers.  Luckily because we used the server name and NOT IP we were ok...

You can reference IP\instance in your connections but WHY?  Linked server in SQL is easy, simple to manage and doesn't hurt anything and has decent security.....