I am similarly disappointed that this didn't go mainstream. At Cumulus we did a follow up experiment to the one in your link, with the WD labs folks using Cumu

I am similarly disappointed that this didn't go mainstream. At Cumulus we did a follow up experiment to the one in your link, with the WD labs folks using Cumulus Linux switches. The idea was that you'd run the Ceph monitors on the switches, and the OSDs on the hard drives, and you'd have an entire storage array with no servers needed. Was very neat, but pointless unless you can buy the drives...