I had a similar thought with my last upgrade. I went with proxmox hci and ceph storage. Somebody rise mentioned HCI…it’s been really great for me
I have 6 nodes at the present. I just bought them one at a time as the budget allowed. I started out with Lenovo tiny and now I use HP Elitedesk 800 mini g6. Same thing with storage. I have 2 storage pools, one of my ssd/nvme storage where I boot my OS vhds from and then my slow storage for media (hdds). If I need more ram or compute I just add another node to the cluster and spread out my VMs. If I need more storage, add it to one of the nodes in the cluster and ceph will redistribute the files evenly across the drives while online.
I map my 2 cephfs to all of my vms so the primary vhd has the os, Docker, etc…then if I need fast storage it’s already mapped and so is my slow storage. I map all my Docker containers storage to fast and slow cephfs. All of the data it’s stored at the hypervisor level with proxmox and all the vms, containers, and laptops/desktops access the cephfs.
You can run a windows vm, mount the two cephfs storages and run your favorite backup software and back all your data up off site.
Another benefit I was looking for is not having to rebuild this thing every few years when hardware ages out. Because hci uses nodes…I just had a new node with a newer used eBay computer and when the oldest one dies just move the vms…ceph cares for all the data migration.
Proxmox makes ceph and cephfs extremely easy to deploy. You can expose your file share via iscsi or cephs. Windows will need the ceph/dokan driver installed…or iscsi. That’s the only small inconvenience.
My two cents…hope he helps!
Look at nextcloud. It can be mapped to use existing file structure. Has plenty of plugins to do file management, file routing, ocr.
Sterling PDF might be a useful tool as well.