Research institution.

The department saw more need for storage than Kubernetes compute so that's what we're growing. Nowadays you can get storage machines with 1 PB in them.

Yeah, that's an interesting question, because it sounds like a ton of data vs not enough compute, but, aside from this all being in a SAN or large storage array:

The larger Supermicro or Quanta storage servers can easily handle 36 HDD's each, or even more.

So with just 16 of those with 36x24TB disks, that meets the ~14PB capacity mark, leaving 44 remaining nodes for other compute task, load balancing, NVME clusters, etc.