You can get a petabyte for like $14k now. Make a massive SAN. Even 10G networking is reasonable.

Compute? You can run stuff like Proxmox in commercial mode and get tons of features for really reasonable price.

Ram is now the big nasty, but I'm thinking with the 500 billion USD dropped on this circlejerk economy, ram will come back down.

You can also get a few graphics cards for AI stuff, but I'd constrain it to actual dedicated reasons, rather than some "AI everywhere".

Backups can be tricky. Run tape, but also run encrypted S3 backups remote, for 'holyshiteverythingsgone' reasons.

I used to be syseng for a small dev company. They had 3 racks by a local MSP, and was grossly mismanaged. Could have did everything in 1.5 racks. I have pictures, and you'd be aghast.

@dang why was my response autokilled?