In summary, I am looking for an 8-16 3.5" bay half-depth/short-depth NAS (roughly 20" max depth) that will fit into an AV rack of standard 19" width but that doesn’t have a back rail. Ideally this is all used or mostly enterprise gear that can be very cost effective and readily attainable.
CURRENT SETUP:
I have several customers running the Dell T400 Tower series (2 drives -RD01_SSD_Host OS, 2 drives - RD01_SSD_Guest OS, 3 drives - RD05_HDD_DATA). Guest OS is Windows Server Essentials w/ Hyper V, Guest OS is Windows Server Essentials with Active Directory & the RD05 set is passed through or virtual harddrive. All of these servers were roughly $10-15K each when put in service 5-7 years ago. Data wise each customer has very little data 5-10TB of actual data. There are also 1-4 drives extra in each system that are backup drives or hotspares.
GOAL:
I’d like to be able to replace these Tower servers with a single short-depth TrueNAS scale system that integrates the storage and VMs. I’d like to be able to achieve 10G out of this for the data storage side as well as dedicated 10G links for the 1-2VMs. Cost wise I would like to be about the $3-6K.
It looks like a 2-4U form factor is somewhat achievable if I just buy an off the shelf case but I was hoping I wasn’t having to design this system from the ground up myself using new parts. The 45Drives / Storinator AV15 looks like a decent option as well but I don’t see that they come on the market all that often used. If there was a good full size server that I could rip the contents out (atx motherboard, powersupplies, cpu, ram, etc) of that could be another good option limiting the items that I would need to buy new.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.