5 ms·

im seeing a lot of "my router" and "my computer" threads so its probably worth it to say this isnt for your home network. Mikrotik is targeting larger customer

im seeing a lot of "my router" and "my computer" threads so its probably worth it to say this isnt for your home network. Mikrotik is targeting larger customers with a product that handles offloading to the ASIC's on the board, which is far more performant and scalable than COTS ethernet cards or the onboard gigabit. the reason you would slap a router card in your rackmount server is because its an IOMMU passthrough to a k8s service load balancer or straight up just openstack and the push toward hyperconvergence. the switch is already virtual inside the kvm on openvswitch (has been for a decade now), but the router is still hardware and this product aims to solve that problem.

kiallmacinnes 5y ago
> this device can handle a lot: firewalls, user management and access control for home media and file servers, and even some traffic control in data centers – without the need for a stand-alone router. It's definitely got home networks as a target market. It's one of the suggested use cases.
core-utility 5y ago
It's also worth saying that Mikrotik is a common platform for "homelabbers" who use enterprise-grade (ish) hardware in their homes. RouterOS isn't without its flaws and pain points, but Mikrotik brings high quality features into a low cost package that appeals to many. It's the lesser-known (and polished) brother of what Ubiquiti used to be.
- mjochim 5y ago
  Are you saying lesser known and less polished or lesser known and more polished?
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It's lesser known and not as slick (polished) but it is quite capable and a good deal at the price point. And it doesn't have cloud dependencies to manage it.
aseipp 5y ago
You aren't wrong but honestly I'm having a hard-time envisioning a target audience for this device besides the ardent homelab crowd, or existing Microtik users who just want to eliminate one more piece of gear like a normal CCR from their setup and move it into the server itself. I don't see many "larger customers" moving to something like this instead of competitors. It's not like it's priced out of homelabs; $200 MSRP is the price of an entry level 2x10G Intel card and I'd consider that table stakes for actually adventurous home networking. The bandwidth on the interfaces isn't high enough to match most enterprise customers needs -- 25GBe/40GBe had pretty marginal market penetration compared to 10G where you don't need hyperconverged solutions, and beyond that most major hyperscalers and others have skipped straight to 100G as far as I can see, to leverage economies of scale. And the CPU complex and ASIC together aren't powerful enough with enough resources to offload serious "service provider compute" workloads to; they even note specifically things like it reaches "line rate with Jumbo Frames", where most of those other solutions aim for line rate @ MTU, so I'm suspicious of that wording. And on top of that you need some actual dedicated engineering (operations, engineers) to utilize a solution like this versus just reserving AWS instances with ENA adapters or whatever. Anything this can do, something like Bluefield will just do better in every way, if you need the hardware yourself. So I legitimately have a hard time envisioning anyone other than random nerds buying these. Any large customer is probably better off just going with Nvidia (Bluefield) or Intel (Mount Evans). But hey, for two 25GBe ports at the price of a normal 10GBe card, as long as I can pass them through directly I suppose I can handle RouterOS or whatever, and if the software gets more advanced that's cool too. And if it gets more people on the whole converged infrastructure bandwagon, sounds good!
- iso1210 5y ago
  I've got a few hundred mikrotiks, mainly CCRs and 1100AHs, I guess I could merge my monitoring machine and my router, and it's handy if I just want to deploy a single device somewhere but manage it in the same way (firewalls, vpns etc), it's certainly not something I've being waiting for.
- depereo 5y ago
  25 to the server is pretty popular in mid-tier IaaS providers. Means you can use 48x25GbE switches on the edge, which are pretty economical now. I don't see this card being that popular in that market however; if you want solid tcp offload and asic acceleration there's xilinx cards with a good reputation already.
OJFord 5y ago
I'm sure Mikrotik gear is on plenty of HN (and /r/homelab, et al.) members' home network. It's the budget end of 'serious gear' so there's a decent amount of it in homes, probably rivals (the totally different demographic buying) gamer-marketed consumer network gear.

kiallmacinnes 5y ago

> this device can handle a lot: firewalls, user management and access control for home media and file servers, and even some traffic control in data centers – without the need for a stand-alone router. It's definitely got home networks as a target market. It's one of the suggested use cases.

core-utility 5y ago

It's also worth saying that Mikrotik is a common platform for "homelabbers" who use enterprise-grade (ish) hardware in their homes. RouterOS isn't without its flaws and pain points, but Mikrotik brings high quality features into a low cost package that appeals to many. It's the lesser-known (and polished) brother of what Ubiquiti used to be.

mjochim 5y ago
Are you saying lesser known and less polished or lesser known and more polished?
- bombcar 5y ago
  It's lesser known and not as slick (polished) but it is quite capable and a good deal at the price point. And it doesn't have cloud dependencies to manage it.

aseipp 5y ago

You aren't wrong but honestly I'm having a hard-time envisioning a target audience for this device besides the ardent homelab crowd, or existing Microtik users who just want to eliminate one more piece of gear like a normal CCR from their setup and move it into the server itself. I don't see many "larger customers" moving to something like this instead of competitors. It's not like it's priced out of homelabs; $200 MSRP is the price of an entry level 2x10G Intel card and I'd consider that table stakes for actually adventurous home networking. The bandwidth on the interfaces isn't high enough to match most enterprise customers needs -- 25GBe/40GBe had pretty marginal market penetration compared to 10G where you don't need hyperconverged solutions, and beyond that most major hyperscalers and others have skipped straight to 100G as far as I can see, to leverage economies of scale. And the CPU complex and ASIC together aren't powerful enough with enough resources to offload serious "service provider compute" workloads to; they even note specifically things like it reaches "line rate with Jumbo Frames", where most of those other solutions aim for line rate @ MTU, so I'm suspicious of that wording. And on top of that you need some actual dedicated engineering (operations, engineers) to utilize a solution like this versus just reserving AWS instances with ENA adapters or whatever. Anything this can do, something like Bluefield will just do better in every way, if you need the hardware yourself. So I legitimately have a hard time envisioning anyone other than random nerds buying these. Any large customer is probably better off just going with Nvidia (Bluefield) or Intel (Mount Evans). But hey, for two 25GBe ports at the price of a normal 10GBe card, as long as I can pass them through directly I suppose I can handle RouterOS or whatever, and if the software gets more advanced that's cool too. And if it gets more people on the whole converged infrastructure bandwagon, sounds good!

iso1210 5y ago
I've got a few hundred mikrotiks, mainly CCRs and 1100AHs, I guess I could merge my monitoring machine and my router, and it's handy if I just want to deploy a single device somewhere but manage it in the same way (firewalls, vpns etc), it's certainly not something I've being waiting for.
depereo 5y ago
25 to the server is pretty popular in mid-tier IaaS providers. Means you can use 48x25GbE switches on the edge, which are pretty economical now. I don't see this card being that popular in that market however; if you want solid tcp offload and asic acceleration there's xilinx cards with a good reputation already.

OJFord 5y ago

I'm sure Mikrotik gear is on plenty of HN (and /r/homelab, et al.) members' home network. It's the budget end of 'serious gear' so there's a decent amount of it in homes, probably rivals (the totally different demographic buying) gamer-marketed consumer network gear.