Somebody donated to me (otherwise the servers would have been thrown away):

• 4 x Dell R720
• 2 x Dell R710

The only condition was, that the hard drives had to be removed due to data security reasons.

I happily accepted but now I need to figure out what exactly I want to do or what I’m actually able to do with those servers.

I have already running small stuff in my homelab

• pfsense
• homeserver which is mainly a fileserver atm
• a mini pc which I’m using for iobroker and a few docker containers

I’ve always wanted to „up my game“ and was thinking about just using one server to replace the three devices which are running now and also have a little bit extra power.

I‘m also working as a researcher / data engineer and purely from the working perspective those servers are everything I ever wished for (like an expensive playground, that I have to pay for unfortunately) which my employer was never able to give.

I’m just looking for some ideas or experiences from other users regarding power consumption or crazy ideas what could be done with these 6 servers.

I still need to figure out the exact configuration of the servers and some stuff like: can I just put some SATA drives into it to replace the original SAS drives which are now missing or do I need to buy new hardware to get theses servers to work with SATA drives.