I've never been a fan of roll-your-own solutions in the enterprise, simply because anything in use in the enterprise needs to have vendor support and SLAs behind it. Buying a bunch of mid-range Dell desktops and packing them full of whatever drive you can get your hands on sounds like a recipe for failure. What happens in 2 or 3 years when a drive or part dies and you can't find suitable replacement? Do you self-stock replacements on site or pray to the FedEx gods that a replacement can be delivered in a timely manner?
That said, in a small business where cost is almost as important as reliability, there may be room for these roll-your-own solutions. Maybe for a cost-focused business, saving thousands of dollars is worth having a random 2 day downtime sometime in the future, but for large enterprises, it's not.
