We currently are using custom built servers as standalone backup machines (using rsync/zfs snapshotting). They run freebsd (just so we can use ZFS) and have 16 SATA HDD's in them all connected as straight jbod's and zfs handles the rest.

We have had a lot of trouble and have put in a lot of time and expense maintaining these things, and I am considering replacing them with a supported server from one of the big dealers (HP, Dell, Oracle etc).

Our only real requirements are that

* It needs to house 16 HDD's (and an internal boot disk)
* It needs to be a standalone server (not a DAS/SAN/NAS appliance.. we want to run a proper OS on it)
* We want to run ZFS for disk management
* It needs to be affordable. We don't need any fancy features, we basically just would need SATA disks to run the arrays, not alot of compute power. But I guess either FreeBSD or solaris would be needed for zfs.

Like I said we have been doing this ourselves and we just find it eats up alot of time for the system administrators (there are plenty of stories out there like the backblaze blogs of doing it yourself). But we're looking for an off the shelf solution so we can get onto doing other things.

Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks!