FWIW, I recently purchased maybe 21U worth of servers for less than $2000. Mostly IBM 2U servers (all dual 6-cores / 12-threads Xeon, most for spare parts), NAS (enough for triple >12TB redundancy), and LTO-4 loaders and drives to go in a rack I picked up for free locally which also came Cisco switches.

I'm gonna run my private cloud merging 3 different un-backed up physical computers, and migrate services off Google.

That's my second free 42U track, but the other was mostly used as shelf space. I've got a third rack rusting in my backyard which I bought for locally for $200, originally intended to run my former employer test infra, that I brought back home after they laid us off.