Neither are the HP DL360 servers that I have in my lab, but we are kind of an exception. I am looking to scale my lab down to more modest needs. The 10gbe is hard to break though and keeps making me look at more power hungry devices.
Already getting grief about my budget requests, current storage was built in 2016 and 2017. The prices on storage units have gone up by a lot to where shaving things down to $4800.00 each is kind of a feat. We’re talking 4 to 5TB usable storage servers, nothing extravagant here. Even with spinning drives you only save about $200-$300. Thread here AMD Epyc 7313 for Truenas?
A very basic storage server with really no frills except the ability to expand the storage later if needs change.
I priced out a “small” NVME unit to replace a different server, dual Xeon Silver, dual 64GB (4x32) ram, 20+2+2 and possible a +1 m.2 storage server with 1.9TB drives… This was $28,000.00. Would be fast enough for a whole classroom to edit 200mbps video to/from. Current server is bigger but way slower, can safely get about 4 people working with the same files, maybe. That would be 20 storage array, 2 as spare or cache, 2 as OS, and single m.2 as cache. And I’d put in a dual 25gbe card along with the dual 10gbe that comes with the riser. Clients are still gigabit and normally not more than 20 of them at any given time.