Disclaimer: We quit buying RaQ's after the RaQ 4, so my experience is only with the Qube, RaQ 1, RaQ 2, RaQ 2+, RaQ 3, RaQ 3i, RaQ 4i, and RaQ 4r. I have no experience with any of the later models.
They work great if you need to host under 250 web sites without much in the way of special server needs. The interface takes a lot of the stress out of running a server, but we've found the same thing can be accomplished with the various CP's out there and a few shell scripts run from cron.
They serve their target market well: server administrators that are looking for a solution that works out of the box without a lot of expandability or frills. They're also good if you are colocating because even the most non-technical staff could handle rebooting it from the front panel.
Why did we move away from them? Several reasons:
1. When Sun took over Cobalt, several back end policies changed that we had grown to love. The major one is that they quit providing security updates on their older models after about 18 months. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem, but if you try to apply security fixes that weren't designed specifically for the RaQ, you inevitably would break the interface or the interface would undo the changes the next time you updated a setting.
2. We got tired of all the cords. We run our own datacenter, so cord management is more of an issue than space. We get space (raw, unfinished) for about $0.30 per square foot around here and we have tons of it. It was always interesting trying to explain to local fire officials that the big pile of cords didn't represent an overloaded electrical system because each cord was only pushing 60 watts of load.
3. Quality control on the RaQ 3 and RaQ 4 models just plain sucked. Fans failed. CPU's overheated. Hard drives failed. Power supplies failed. I suppose the root cause of it all was the fan failures. Those fans just would quit working after a couple of months of operation. Then everything goes buns up as heat silently destroys the system without any warning. The large majority of our RaQ 1 and RaQ 2 systems have fans that have been running flawlessly for years. Every RaQ 3 and RaQ 4 has had at least one of their two fans fail within 12 months of the purchase (brand new).
Like I said before, I can't speak for the XTR and later models. Maybe they got all those issues worked out. Whatever the case, they lost this customer and we've since been using custom built systems with the usual CP software that you can buy. It's worked well for us and we've been happy with the decision.
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