if office, I'd certainly just get minitowers.
For office, I would recommend barebones in SFF (small form factor) cases,
like those commonly advertised for HTPC (Home theater PC). I have built a
well, SFF shoeboxes would be a good idea, but they tend to be somewhat
specialized. for instance, they normally only have a single cpu socket.
but they're good because the PSU is often sized modestly (the sweet spot
for PSU efficiency is somewhere around 75% load.) I don't know whether
there would be any problem putting a real interconnect card (10G, IB, etc)
into one of these - some are designed for GPU cards, so would have 8 or 16x
pcie slots. if you're only using gigabit, an SFF shoebox might be quite a
good fit, including low-power integrated video. there are "book" format
SFF's that might do well for the gigabit/integrated approach too.
I wouldn't mention HTPC, though - in stores around here at least that
term implies a box specialized to look like AV components, often with
milled aluminum bezel, fancy displays, etc.
cluster of 80 of those (Shuttle SB75G2) in 2004, you can see a rather bad
picture in the "IWR Cluster 4 part a" section of:
http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/services/equipment/parallel/
nice.
I think SFF's would be very nice, though probably would mean giving up any
pretense of server-ish-ness, such as dual sockets or IPMI, and probably
sticking to onboard gigabit. for an office, though, a stack of 10 of them
would still probably be a problem in total dissipation.
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