blades, bricks and a truly thin server (Score 1)

A lot of the machines in my shop do little but shovel stuff between a hard disk and an ethernet port perhaps by way of a web and/or sql server. Keyboard, mouse, vga, usb, parallel are all distractions to the main task.

My ideal motherboard would have a single ethernet connector and be POE powered. The official POE standard supports only 13.5 watts and I want to be able to spin one of the larger hard disks available so I am prepared to accept a second 12v. power connector which implies an internal inverter.

The BIOS would support only PXE boots although the image of a functional machine is on the hard disk. The normal boot sequence would load a boot image off the hard drive while a "special" image could be loaded to test the hard drive and reload a fresh image. This would be accomplished from a workstation on the network.

Physical configuration would be like slices with vents on the long edge and resting on an external fan. Each slice would have two connectors on the front, power and RJ45 jack.

I suggest such a system would be a vast improvement over all the blade designs in existence.