Proxmox AI server build weighs Dell, HP options

This is a total-cost-of-ownership question disguised as a hardware shopping list. The legacy Dell route buys redundancy, but it also buys idle power, fan noise, RAID complexity, and a lot of old silicon to babysit.

• –Version 1 spreads the budget across multiple aging rack servers, so the electricity and maintenance bill is likely to keep climbing even if the purchase price looks familiar.
• –The thread's early replies already lean away from the R730 generation and toward the R7515, which is the more sensible Proxmox base for the next two years.
• –HP's ZGX Nano G1n is the most modern piece in the mix, with 128GB unified memory, a 4TB NVMe SSD, and a 240W adapter, so it makes sense as a local prototyping or inference node.
• –The smartest split is probably hot compute on one efficient node and cold storage on separate cheap disks, not a cluster of legacy servers trying to do everything.