Well, to answer your questions you need to discuss why you are looking at buying one in the first place. Myself, I bought it to replace white box servers I cobbled together for training purposes, and in that regard the C6005 works great.
Some complain about power consumption, but twelve cores w/48 Gigs RAM & 2 SATA HDs consume well under 150 watts - for my application that's fine - I can run all three nodes off a typical wall outlet without issue.
Some complain about absolute processing power - I'm only interested in snappy responses inside lightly-used VMs, not production use. I might shy away from these units because of their speed, but again, for my application I can toss a bunch of VMs on a single mode with plenty of cycles to spare.
Some complain about relative cost - for my application, price trumps raw processing power. That I can get a machine three times as powerful for only twice the money (as a made up example) is not attractive to me - it simply costs too much.
Some worry about a lack of BIOS - BIOS updates are really only needed if the installed BIOS has issues, and honestly, these machines have been used for years in production, I think it's safe to consider these systems & their BIOS thou roughly tested.
Some complain about a lack if expand ability - a PCIe riser is less than $20/ea (if you need one), and four hard-wired SATA ports suffice in most instances.
Bottom line, I now have three very-well provisioned VM hosts that fit nicely in a server rack and allow me to recreate many, many production / training scenarios in a home labe environment. I can put this server behind a 1500VA UPS, connect all the NICs to an 8 port switch, tie all the nodes into a consumer 4 port USB KVM and have a very, very capable & resilient home lab for less than $800.
To me, they are a bargain, and I'd get another one in a heartbeat IF I could only contrive a scenario this current three node chassis doesn't satisfy.
Some complain about power consumption, but twelve cores w/48 Gigs RAM & 2 SATA HDs consume well under 150 watts - for my application that's fine - I can run all three nodes off a typical wall outlet without issue.
Some complain about absolute processing power - I'm only interested in snappy responses inside lightly-used VMs, not production use. I might shy away from these units because of their speed, but again, for my application I can toss a bunch of VMs on a single mode with plenty of cycles to spare.
Some complain about relative cost - for my application, price trumps raw processing power. That I can get a machine three times as powerful for only twice the money (as a made up example) is not attractive to me - it simply costs too much.
Some worry about a lack of BIOS - BIOS updates are really only needed if the installed BIOS has issues, and honestly, these machines have been used for years in production, I think it's safe to consider these systems & their BIOS thou roughly tested.
Some complain about a lack if expand ability - a PCIe riser is less than $20/ea (if you need one), and four hard-wired SATA ports suffice in most instances.
Bottom line, I now have three very-well provisioned VM hosts that fit nicely in a server rack and allow me to recreate many, many production / training scenarios in a home labe environment. I can put this server behind a 1500VA UPS, connect all the NICs to an 8 port switch, tie all the nodes into a consumer 4 port USB KVM and have a very, very capable & resilient home lab for less than $800.
To me, they are a bargain, and I'd get another one in a heartbeat IF I could only contrive a scenario this current three node chassis doesn't satisfy.
