[gorkish]

I actually do run a production edge cluster with these exact boards; they are just too old. The price/performance is so far off the mark WRT modern hardware they are simply not worth using anymore. I have started hitting CPU instruction set issues with current software due to the ancient microarchitectures in these lowend parts.

On one hand they are able to still sell them because nobody is competing, but what is the reason for the lack of competition?

I have a theory about Broadcom buying and blocking up the low end PCIe switch market to purposely hold back this segment, but I'm not sure how significant that is.