I'm in the automation/manufacturing industry, and while I know there are big servers running ERPs and SCMs and MES and other TLAs with poorly-optimized giant da

I'm in the automation/manufacturing industry, and while I know there are big servers running ERPs and SCMs and MES and other TLAs with poorly-optimized giant databases I don't personally touch those. But still I suspect the same truths apply whether you're talking about "big iron" computers or literal metals: when evaluating the strength of an average weldment on an ordinary conveyor or machine, we like to say "Steel is cheap, engineering is expensive." Obviously there are situations when you have to employ more rigor and do the FEA, but typically, when choosing between a just-right solution and one that's obviously strong enough, just overbuilding it is a lot more efficient in terms of value. With 21 of the pictured $150 Samsung 1TB 990 Pro SSDs and, hypothetically, $1000 for this card, you're looking at $4,150 for this storage solution. If that solves your problem and lets you apply off-the-shelf Postgres and JSON and unoptimized queries, do it! That money only buys a handful of site visits and maybe a week of engineering hours to change a system that may involve dozens of users, tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and rigid requirements from upstream and downstream...maybe you can change those eventually, and it would definitely have been cheaper if all the stakeholders had a fundamental understanding of the compute requirements of full table scans and non-native blobs and designed their business around those mathematics, but that doesn't sound likely.