Looking to replace file server at work -- updated 2018 advice? (1 Viewer)

We've got a 12-year-old Dell PowerEdge 2900 at our office, running Windows Server Standard operating system (Properties says '(c) 2007' ... it seems to be neither 2003 nor 2008 but something in between?). It's on Service Pack 2, which itself is probably ancient.

Other high-level specs:

Processor - one single (I think) Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5430 at (up to?) 2.66GHz. These machines are supposed to accomodate two processors ... but Properties only lists one.
Memory - 8 GB. Not sure how it's allocated within the twelve available DIMM slots.
Internal storage - 1.4 TB. This model of server was supposed to ship with just over 1.7 TB on six SAS and four SATA drives of varying sizes. Maybe one or more of the stock drives were switched out in the past for smaller drives.
32- or 64-Bit? - 64-bit operating system

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Anyway. We're looking to replace it with something of comparable function, but with

(a) an up-to-date, currently-supported Windows operating system (not looking for a Mac or Linux OS), and
(b) more internal storage. We're growing, and are closing to using up the entire 1.4 TB we've got. Would like to get at least 3 TB in our next server purchase ... 5 TB or more would be ideal if the price difference isn't too great.

A refurbished server would be fine ... it's just that we want something for which both the hardware and the OS will be supported for a few more years to come. In my mind, I'm thinking around 2014-15 would be about the oldest we'd want to go.

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So, anyway ... anybody have any advice for how to go about evaluating servers? Comparing the pros and cons of new machines vs. refurbished? How a semi-technical staffer (me) can do a good job of searching for the best balance of function and price possible?

People may ask what we use the server for. The answer is "everything" --  e-mail, file storage, hosting (?) the VPN, etc. This is a small shop ... 12 local employees and a changing number of employees at other sites (typically around 25-30 employees at any one time). We aim to expand to something around 80-100 (mostly remote) employees in the next 2 to 3 years, so any new server would be hammered more often from remote users than our current server has been. 

Making things a little tougher is that I haven't been given a budget ... no number to shoot for. I know that refurbished old servers just like the one we've got are STILL being sold and re-sold, going for around $500. That makes me curious as to what we can do for, say, $2,000. My spidey sense is that much more than $3,000 may cause sticker-shock from the higher-ups -- but maybe a good case can be made for the right machine with the right amount of expected longevity.

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I know this was a lot to read through. Thanks in advance for any advice.

One self-pity bump

I might be in a bit over my head here, but just a bit. When looking through all this stuff, I speak about half of the language ... but the other half is just out of my grasp.  

try posting here  https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/

Thanks, Fiddles.

Not a whole lot to add other than I don’t  think you’ll have a problem finding more HD space, and you might want to consider running a Hyper-V server and splitting some of those functions onto different virtual machines.

Personally, I am trying to get as much stuff as I can moved to cloud hosting. I work for a school system and I don’t have the time, budget, or as much technical expertise as I would like on hand to keep my server room in the shape I would like to to be in.

Thanks, Rustoleum. I know we're totally committed to keeping a physical server on premises. We may go with cloud storage back-up, though (the alternative being a remote, dedicated physical server).

Not sure if you have a O365 business license or not but...

We are currently looking to move our 2+ petabytes of file server data off on-premise servers to Azure File storage.. 

1.  IS building your own an option?  Dell will advertise a very low price for a barebones server, then make their profit when you start adding hard drives and memory to it.  If you need Dell technical support,  it is cheaper to add the extra memory and hard drives yourself. 

2.  I would strongly recommend getting a NAS to handle the file serving. Depending on what you get, the NAS will also be able to handle email.  You will be able to backup the server to the NAS, and backup the NAS to Amazon (or another cloud vendor) very easily.  The NAS will also let you run RAID very easily, won't get viruses, etc.

3.  If you get the NAS, you won't need a powerful CPU or one with a lot of RAM.  Even if you don't get the NAS, you don't really need a powerful CPU or a lot of RAM.  Today's CPUs or very efficient.   About the only servers that need to be powerful are databases, web servers (that get thousands of concurrent users), computational heavy servers, and servers to render video or Photoshop type stuff, etc)  With a NAS, you could use a desktop computer as your server if you wanted to...

Depending on how mission critical this server is, you should probably be spending way more than $3000 on this project.

I'll start with, why is an on-premise server a requirement?  If this is really just email and file shares, why not Office 365 instead?