There are applications and workloads where storage density is a key consideration, and the set of data models isn't that small as a subset of the market. Networ

There are applications and workloads where storage density is a key consideration, and the set of data models isn't that small as a subset of the market. Networked storage is not a substitute for NVMe when working with very large storage volumes due to the poor storage bandwidth. For some workloads you also cannot substitute a single high-density server with multiple low-density servers for effectively the same reason (low bandwidth to remote storage). For these workloads, ultra-high density storage can definitely be cost effective within reason. It bears keeping in mind that most popular open source software is not designed to be effective for storage densities anywhere near this high. If you are working with data at this density then you are likely using one of the closed source storage engines designed to work at this scale running straight off of the raw block device.