But that's a lot of extra overhead too. You need monitors, OSDs, metadata servers, etc...

If you're comfortable with the node being a single point of failure, you can do a lot with a single storage node connected to a JBOD and serving data over NFS. And even if the node is the unit of failure, you can attach a SAS JBOD to multiple servers if you'd like.

In my position, in addition to the added cost, I just don't have the physical rack space for the extra servers required for ceph.