Nowadays, a single 2u server can realistically support 2x 100gig nics at full bore. So the biggest barrier is density. You can probably get 1pb in a rack now, and linking a bunch of jbods(well NVMEs) is probably easily to do now.
sorry I should have added a caveat of 1pb _at decent performance_
That seagate array will be fine for streaming (so long as you spread the data properly) as soon as you start mixing read/write loads on that, it'll start to chug. You can expect 70-150iops out of each drive, and thats a 60 drive array (from guess, you can get 72 drives in a 4u, but they are less maintainable, well used to be, thing might have improved recently)
When I was using luster with ultra scisi (yes, that long ago) we had good 10-20 racks to get to 100tb, that could sustain 1gigabyte a second.
Agreed, it depends on the use case. For some "more storage" is all that matters, for others you don't want to be bottlenecked on getting it into / out of the machine or through processing.
