I was literally looking today to see if there was any news on this, because it’s been widely assumed that they’d release it.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
This is not a homelab replacement part. It’s enterprise with all the positive and negatives that come with that phrase. The second you start talking about old X hardware, it’s a different product class.
For that use case I recommend UNas from ugreen or the minis forum ryzen Ai stuff.
Think about the competitors - they're aiming at the Synology RackStations and similar, which are $3-5k without drives.
The segment UI and Synology are in are 10x more than the minisforum, beelink, qnap, cwwk type devices, but still 1/10 of the price of getting started in enterprise gear from HPe, Dell, Pure, etc.
I recently bought a used Dell R240 and 4x 20TB for less than this. From TechmikeNY if anyone's interested.