Nutanix is a nightmare when it's over-utilized or you have random node failures. We have 12 nodes and I think lost about 4 man-weeks last year to supporting it.

> $700 24 core Xeons on eBay 2 years ago

Can you clarify? I don't think such a product exists as a single chip at that price point. The Threadripper 3960X costs $1400, and that released less than a year ago.

Edit: Looking up Intel chips on Wikipedia, I think you might be using 12-core/24-thread chips...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Xe...

I picked up three Dell R900's for an average of $200 each, with 4x Xeon E7450 and 128GB of ECC RAM. No hyperthreading (2011!), it's 24 real cores.

They're noisy and use lots of power, but you can't argue with the value for money.

I have one similar to this. I don't think it is an R900, but it's an older 1U rack mount. I forget if it's a 12 or 24 core xeon, but it was dirt cheap, came with 72 gigs of RAM, and sounds like a jet engine turning it on. I recently built a Ryzen box with 128 gigs of RAM and it's much quieter...

How high are your power costs?

Manufacturing company with insane deal with local utility. No idea but server room cost is probably under 2% of machinery cost so hard to quantify.