Name: eRacks Rackmount NAS Lineup
Brand: eRacks Systems
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.8 (120 reviews)

eRacks/NAS36 24/36-bay rackmount NAS chassis - elbow view — eRacks/NAS24 + NAS36 – 4U rackmount NAS chassis

The data storage market in 2026 is doing something unusual: it’s both growing fast and getting cheaper per terabyte at the same time. Global storage requirements are projected to nearly double by 2029, hitting roughly 20,000 exabytes. The NAS hardware market alone is forecast to grow from $55B today to $173B+ by 2034 – a 15.5% CAGR. And while all that’s happening, 30TB+ enterprise SATA drives have become genuinely mainstream, with retail prices that put petabyte-scale on-premise storage within reach of mid-sized organizations for the first time.

Meanwhile, the cloud-storage decade is hitting a wall. Egress fees on AWS, Azure and GCP have only gone up. Ransomware losses keep climbing. Healthcare, legal, finance, and government buyers are all asking the same question they used to leave for the IT department: where, exactly, is our data? The answer “somewhere in us-east-1” doesn’t satisfy a HIPAA auditor, a SOC 2 attestation, or a court order anymore.

The on-premise comeback is a hardware story

For years, the argument against running storage in your own rack was capex vs opex – “cloud is cheaper because you don’t buy hardware.” That math has flipped for any organization storing more than a few hundred TB. A 36-bay NAS loaded with 24TB drives gives you nearly a petabyte of raw storage for the price of about 8-10 months of equivalent S3 storage at production-tier rates – and the hardware keeps working for 5-7 years after that.

Three things made it flip:

HDD prices at historic lows. 28TB and 30TB enterprise drives now sell for under $20/TB. A decade ago, that was 2TB-drive territory.
ZFS and modern Linux file systems matured. ZFS in particular – with built-in checksumming, snapshots, replication, and dedup – has become the default storage layer for serious on-premise deployments. No vendor lock-in, no licensing tax.
Cloud egress is the new vendor lock. Pulling 100TB out of S3 to migrate workloads costs more than the hardware that would store it locally for 5 years.

The eRacks NAS lineup

Our rackmount NAS line covers everything from a small workgroup file server to true petabyte-scale storage chassis. All ship with real Ubuntu Linux (your choice of file system – ZFS, XFS, or Btrfs), enterprise components (ECC RAM, redundant power supplies, hot-swap bays), and zero proprietary management software. The OS is yours, the data is yours, the hardware is yours.

Model	Form	Bays	Max Raw	Starting
NAS4	1U	4	144TB	$1,895
NAS6	2U	6	180TB	$2,795
NAS8	2U	8	240TB+	$3,695
NAS12	2U	12	360TB	$4,695
NAS16	3U	16+2	288TB	$6,595
NAS24	4U	24	720TB	$8,995
NAS36	4U	36	~1PB	$10,495
NAS50	9U	50	1.3PB	$13,595
NAS60	4U	60	~2PB	$15,995
NAS72	4U	72	1.5PB+	$19,995
NAS100	4U	102	2.6PB	$24,995

Starting prices are barebones (chassis, motherboard, PSU); add drives, RAM, OS choice at configuration. Custom builds welcome.

What you actually run on it

Because we don’t ship a proprietary OS, you get to pick the storage stack that matches your workload. Common combinations our customers deploy:

File systems: ZFS (default for most deployments), XFS, Btrfs
NAS / file sharing: TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, Samba, NFS, iSCSI
Distributed storage: Ceph, BeeGFS, MooseFS, LizardFS – for multi-node clusters and HPC workloads
Object storage: MinIO (S3-compatible) – increasingly popular as a local target for AI/ML training datasets
Private cloud: NextCloud, Seafile, OwnCloud, Proxmox VE, CloudStack
Backup & sync: Bacula, BorgBackup, restic, rsync, Duplicati

Pre-installed and tested before shipping, or shipped bare for you to provision however you like – your call at order time.

Who’s actually buying these in 2026

Six segments dominate our NAS pipeline this year:

SMBs and mid-market IT trying to escape per-GB cloud bills that have crept past the cost of hardware ownership
Media and production companies with growing 4K/8K video libraries (one production house can fill a 720TB NAS24 in a year)
Healthcare and medical practices with HIPAA and patient-data sovereignty requirements that rule out major cloud providers
Legal firms archiving case files, depositions, and discovery materials that simply cannot leave the building
AI/ML teams needing local high-speed datasets for training – typically pairing a NAS24 or NAS36 with our AI server line for the GPU compute side
MSPs and IT consultancies building private cloud infrastructure for clients who want SaaS economics without surrendering data ownership

What we don’t do

We don’t build consumer NAS appliances. There’s no fancy iOS app to manage your photos. We don’t license a proprietary OS or lock you into a vendor ecosystem. If you want a four-bay desktop box with a slick web UI for your home media collection, we’re not your shop – and that’s fine, lots of good vendors serve that market.

What we do build: enterprise rackmount storage on standard Linux, configurable to your exact spec, that you fully own and can replace any component on. The same approach we’ve taken since 1999.

Get the configuration right

Drive count, RAID level, networking (10/25/100GbE), RAM (1GB per TB is the rule of thumb for ZFS), and OS choice all matter. Reply to this post or hit our contact page with rough requirements and we’ll spec it for you – usually same day.

Browse the full NAS lineup →

joe April 8th, 2026

Posted In: Backups, Linux, Open Source, Rackmount Servers, servers, Storage

Tags: backup, ceph, Cloud Storage Server, eRacks, eRacks signature service, eRacks/NAS24, eRacks/NAS36, eRacks/NAS50, MooseFS, NAS, NAS24, NAS36, NAS50, NAS72, Privacy, Rackmount, sata

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You Want Local AI

Tired of cloud AI bills that keep climbing? Worried about sending sensitive data to third parties? Want to run the latest open-source LLMs like DeepSeek, Llama, Mixtral, or Qwen — on your own hardware?

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about AI servers lately, so we’re excited to officially announce our RAM-optimized AI Rackmount Server lineup — four models designed from the ground up for local-first AI computing.

The Big Idea: RAM > GPU Hype

Here’s something the big vendors don’t want you to know: for many AI workloads — especially LLM inference, RAG pipelines, and vector search — total system RAM matters more than having the flashiest GPU.

Why? Because large language models need to fit somewhere. If your model doesn’t fit in VRAM, it spills into system RAM. If it doesn’t fit there, you’re swapping to disk — and that’s game over for performance.

Our servers are built around this insight. We focus on massive RAM capacity combined with COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) GPUs — the cards you can actually buy, at prices that won’t require board approval.

Meet the Family

So far, we’ve got four models, each named after Celtic / Gaelic names that happen to start with “AI” (we couldn’t resist):
Model Form Factor Max RAM GPUs Starting Price Sweet Spot
eRacks/AILSA 2U 512GB Up to 3 (LP) $4,995 SMBs, solo devs, 200-600B+ models
eRacks/AIDAN 2U 3TB Up to 3 $9,995 Small teams, 800B+ models, RAG
eRacks/AINSLEY 4U 2TB Up to 4 $14,995 R&D, training, fine-tuning
eRacks/AISHA 4U 6TB Up to 8 $19,995 Enterprise, hosting, all MoE models

eRacks/AILSA — The Entry Point

“Affordable Innovative Local Server for Artificial Intelligence” 😄

AILSA is our compact 2U starter — perfect for startups, researchers, and developers who want local AI without the sticker shock. With up to 512GB RAM and 3 low-profile GPUs (Intel Arc B50 or NVIDIA RTX 5060 LP), it punches well above its weight class for inference workloads.

Best for: Private chatbots, development sandboxes, entry-level RAG, running 600B+ parameter models locally.

eRacks/AIDAN — “The RAMstack”

AIDAN steps up to Dual AMD EPYC processors and up to 3TB of DDR5 ECC RAM. This is the machine for teams doing serious vector search, RAG pipelines, or serving LLMs to multiple users.

Best for: Small-to-medium teams, 800B+ models, retrieval-augmented generation, production inference.

eRacks/AINSLEY — The R&D Workhorse

Our 4U Threadripper-based system with up to 4 full-size GPUs and 2TB RAM. AINSLEY is built for the folks who need to train, fine-tune, and experiment — not just run inference.

Best for: Research labs, AI/ML startups, fine-tuning on private datasets, local experimentation.

eRacks/AISHA — The Beast

“Advanced Intelligent Server for High-RAM AI”

When you need to go all-in: up to 6TB RAM, up to 8 GPUs, and dual Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC processors. AISHA handles the largest MoE (Mixture of Experts) models, multi-tenant deployments, and enterprise-scale AI infrastructure.

Best for: Enterprise hosting, 800B+ models, multi-user deployments, running every MoE model out there.
Why Local? Why Now?

A few reasons we’re seeing massive demand for on-prem AI:

Privacy — Your data never leaves your building
Cost control — No per-token fees, no surprise bills
No rate limits — Run as many queries as your hardware can handle
Model freedom — Run any open-source model: Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma, and more
Customization — Fine-tune on your own data without uploading it anywhere

100% Open Source Ready

All our AI servers ship with Ubuntu and Ollama pre-installed, plus your choice of models (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, etc.). We also support custom preconfigurations:

• PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX
• Hugging Face Transformers
• LangChain, vLLM, LM Studio
• OpenWebUI, LibreChat
• Milvus, Chroma (vector databases)
• Docker / Podman for containerized workflows

And of course — Rocky Linux, Fedora, Debian, or whatever distro you prefer. It’s your hardware.

COTS GPUs: No Vendor Lock-In

We spec readily available GPUs — NVIDIA RTX 30×0/40×0/50×0 series, professional A-series cards, Intel Arc, and AMD options. No waiting 6 months for an allocation. No $30k price tags for a single card. Swap, upgrade, or scale on your terms.

Ready to own your AI stack?
👉 Check out the full AI Server lineup – eracks.com/products/ai-rackmount-servers/
👉 Contact us for a custom quote

We’re happy to help you figure out the right balance of RAM, GPU, and storage for your specific workloads. That’s what we do.

Get Started: eRacks.com/contact

j

joe January 17th, 2026

Posted In: AI, Deep Learning, LLM, Local AI, Ollama, Open Source, Rackmount Servers, RAG, Technology

Tags: AI, Deep Learning, DeepSeek, EPYC, eRacks, eRacks Partner, GPU, Llama, LLM, Local AI, Machine Learning, Ollama, Open Source, Rackmount Servers, RAG, Threadripper

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As always, the latest releases are available to be installed, such as Linux Mint 22.1 (and of course 22.0), Debian Stable 12.9, of course Ubuntu LTS 24.04.1 (and 24.10), Fedora 41, Centos 10, and more – ask us for your favorite if you don’t see it listed.

J

joe January 28th, 2025

Posted In: Debian, Fedora, Linux, Mint, Open Source, Operating Systems, Technology

Tags: CentOS, Debian, fedora, Latest, LTS, ubuntu

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We are now an official supporter of the OSAID (Open Source AI Definition):