Maybe see if you can turn up old 4U or 8U chassis, and reuse them with old motherboards you have or find lying around. As another commentator said, airflow will be excellent, and you'd have lots of space for local disks too.
If your situation allows it, you could rent out the spare space you have, either by providing standard colocation or by racking old but usable stuff you have spare and making it available (either the real hardware or VMs). Depending on your location and what your pricing could be, this could be a nice side project. One or two cabinets could net a couple hundred (maybe thousand) per month easily, I think.
Another thing: maybe look into engineering-sample (ES) chips (like Xeons) on eBay. For some reason the market is flooded with them, so snap them up while they're around, if you can. You could build some nice kit with them :P
[PS. If the idea of that side project sounds interesting - I wouldn't mind low-scale sysadmin experience, if it would be helpful. My email's in my profile.]
If your situation allows it, you could rent out the spare space you have, either by providing standard colocation or by racking old but usable stuff you have spare and making it available (either the real hardware or VMs). Depending on your location and what your pricing could be, this could be a nice side project. One or two cabinets could net a couple hundred (maybe thousand) per month easily, I think.
Another thing: maybe look into engineering-sample (ES) chips (like Xeons) on eBay. For some reason the market is flooded with them, so snap them up while they're around, if you can. You could build some nice kit with them :P
[PS. If the idea of that side project sounds interesting - I wouldn't mind low-scale sysadmin experience, if it would be helpful. My email's in my profile.]