We are looking to make this rack stand alone and yes it is up against Butterfly's larger products. We would like to make this run free of a host PC. This is very much a big system concept. I hope we do a better product that the competitors but time will tell on that point. It's very unlikely we will do a PCIe backplane for this although we are looking at these for our general HPC products. The bought in industrial backplanes are usually very expensive so it's unlikely we would but that in. However we can use one of our standard ones that we have designed or even a derivative of one of them. The cost is quite reasonable doing it this way.
I would forget any secondary value on any sort of mining kit. If you are banking on that your equations will be wrong. FPGA families have replacements on average every 2 years and the old family will have limited value even still as chips never mind in a system that has either to be reused or silicon recovered. GPUs are even worse for this. Try selling a 2-3 year old GPU. It might have cost £500 but in 2/3 years you can buy a brand new board of equivalent performance usually for less than £100. Second hand maybe it goes for £30. I for one would not want to buy a ex-mining GPU given the stress put on them but of course most people don't mention that on Ebay.
Sounds like a good plan, not having to put a computer together as a host for it, certainly would make the overall costs lowered for us, assuming an existing one wasn't able to be used.
I would not try to resell an old mining gpu or rig, that wouldn't be fair to the poor sod who got it after 2 or 3 years of abuse. Old computers in my house nearly always end up having a secondary purpose once they out-lived there usefulness. At least until they completely fail.
The re-purposing would not it's primary benefit, it's just one of the reasons why having a modifiable system has it's benefit. As a programmer and Designer I would have a use of a GPU farm, if I had the tools to adapt it's purpose, admittedly not a huge one. However I do a fair amount of experimental software in my programming, it's what interested me by bitcoin.
My bigger reason is modding it for extra performance from a new or tweaked bios. I'm just late to the party as such, so still learning.
I don't want to take this off-topic though by what I have plans for. I know FPGA all hold that risk, I just know of those FPGA that have allowed modifications have grown to have tweaks done to it that increased performance by 10-20% which is worth considering as a good selling point.