[thaumaturgy]

(Just FYI, I'm sure you guys have already thought of or experimented with this...)

We've had good luck so far with using small USB flash drives for booting big file servers. We keep the drive image pretty generic and if there's a problem with one, we just replace it with a cloned USB flash drive and reboot, no problem.

It doesn't seem to hurt performance at all for these kinds of uses -- although we do set it up without swap to keep the life of the USB flash device reasonable, which might or might not work in your case.