The netbook pulls about 11W and has its own battery backup, and the miners don't need any local storage at all. A couple edits to the boot server and I can have a new miner up and running in minutes.
If your router for some reason will not let you assign static IP's, or for some reason caps out at 20 (I would have thought better of cisco, but I guess they want you to buy the next biggest one...), then a netbook, old pentium type machine, etc will make a fine router. There are a few linux distros just for this sort of thing, the one I used ages ago was smoothwall.