ASUS RS720-E7/RS12-E 2U Server Barebone Dual LGA 2011 Intel C602-A PCH DDR3 1600/1333/1066/800

Pros: it comes with

* 512 MB hardware raid (pike card) running all 12 drives
* 4 network ports
* 2nd (redundant) power supply

This machine may sound expensive, but if you buy a cheaper machine and add the above to match the features of this machine, it will cost you more.

Setup was painless.

It's been running great for over three months with a 6 core processor (E5-2630), 64Gig RAM (8*8G), and 8*512GB hard drives (4 in RAID 10 and 2 pairs in RAID 1). I have SBS 2011, six Win7 clients, and three Win 08 R2 servers running as development VMs on HyperV mostly for remote developers. No slowness complaint from any of the developers.

Cons: * it's loud, use it only if you've a data-center or rack in the basement where no one hangs around.
* since the pike card runs all the 12 drives, the on-board SATA ports go to waste.
* no space or connectors to add anything. I wanted to use one of the SATA ports to boot from a 64G SSD. There's no place inside to add (event tape or tie) an SSD nor there's a connector to power it.
* no DVD, you'll need to setup a USB drive to install OS.

Other Thoughts: I bought Supermicro last time, I'm still haunted by the pain I had to go through to set that one up. I got two bad pieces in a row and then I had to update BIOS on the third one using DOS! I'm so happy with this ASUS that I'm sticking with it going forward.

Pros: Wasn't sure from NewEgg or the Asus sites but it does come with the optional pike card (which means you can access all 12 drives right out of the box). This isn't the cheapest barebones out there but it's got an amazing amount of expandability, I really like how the ez-flash is built into the bios and even with a single E5-2630 it's amazingly fast.

Cons: Bought this as a test box for Windows Server 8 but even after updating to the 0602 bios it won't load the win8 install (ACPI_BIOS_ERROR). Other OS's seem fine. (Yeah, I know, bleeding edge hardware with a beta OS, what do you expect.)