i have 5 servers at home and it just seems like a given to power them from a single power supply?

even better if it incorporate the functionality that my UPS supporting these servers does.

These servers really aren’t that interesting – they are basically just slightly larger blades. Proprietary motherboards means you’re locked into HP for the form factor. The Rackable CloudRack is kind of cool because you can put different ATX motherboards in there, but it’s still too much case. What would be a huge win is if someone designed a rack with a common AC/DC converter and an ATX power cable for each of 100 motherboards, and had some drive slots and big fans in the whole thing. No extra metal, super cheap. Even a cheap rack plus 2 PDUs costs around $2000, plus 40 or so chassis and power supplies cost $8000+.. so anything you could charge under $10k for the rack and power distribution itself would be a cost saving.

HP finally figured out that blades are no more power efficient than an optimized standard rackmount server, something their scale out customers have been telling them for over five years. While the SL6000 is getting all the press the same half width system boards are used in the DL1000 which will likely have broader appeal. The SL6000 is targeted at low margin high volume customers and are only a good fit for Microsoft, Yahoo, AIC, Facebook, and the like.