I offered a presentation at the 2010 ICCM conference about replacing a couple of servers during this past year. The arrived at configuration was very much a middle point between a normal server configuration at one end and a firmware / USB HDD server at the other end of the spectrum. I was able to deliver a very compact configuration that has low power consumption, yet runs standard Ubuntu Server Linux and has a 3ware RAID card to facilitate drive mirroring.

Presentation in PDF format