I'm not really sure what you mean by hot-plug, though? You want the enclosure to run as an SMP or NUMA machine and remove CPUs while running?

I think my overall problem is that I went looking for the spec sheet on a dishwasher when in fact what I was reading was the spec sheet on a lawnmower. I wondered how the heck it would wash dishes.

On the hot-plug issue, I was really referring to pluggable drives (should have said that) and lack of hot-plug RAID-1 opportunity (well, each blade only has a single drive, so that makes sense).

Anyhow, there still seem to be limitations in how you would apply these, but I have a better sense of what problems they would solve (and the various cable messes they would avoid) thanks to your comments. Yes, you could put the entire rendering farm for that new Steven Seagal Titanic alternative-history flick in one rack footprint. Lack of disk mirroring probably doesn't matter in the overall context of an application like that. So, maybe these servers aren't for everybody, but they're probably for somebody.

That's a great snippet re: MSFT/Solaris.

Thanks,