Mikrotik just announced a new server (router?) running RouterOS.
While the Edge Computing space has many competitors, this thing seems interesting for its price and software choice. Even more if it can run plain linux too.
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The answer the question in the thumbnail:
I don’t trust the cloud, but I trust Mikrotik even less 
Don’t get me wrong, I love Mikrotik hardware, but their software is a PITA even for just Switches. No way I would trust them with actual data!
I also don’t trust BTRFS.
Nonetheless this seems like cool hardware for certain projects.
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That box has an interesting selection of ports. In the setups where I would consider it, more 10G copper ports would be nice.
Given the really low (in comparison to other offerings) power draw, i wonder how that pizza box holds up when using it as block storage for a bunch of VMs.
In BTRFS RAID1 I’ve found it pretty reliable. It even survived an incident where I replaced both drives with ones that would disconnect every five minutes - apparently my motherboard hates WD drives. And once BTRFS raid-stripe-tree becomes more mature, the RAID5/6 support should be better.
Though if I have a choice, I’d definitely go ZFS over BTRFS any day for software RAID.
It is simply too new in terms of age, and not enough battle proofed.
I mean, that time it took for them to finally realize and admit that their RAID5 and 6 implementation is basically broken, speaks volumes IMHO.
Doesn’t look too bad. And Mikrotik is really innovating and pushing interesting new products to their portfolio.
I really like the approach. I’m not sure if it works that well, as it breaks with more traditional approaches. But strong networking and storage is a nice take on HCI, especially for NVMe over TCP or NVMeoF, which are the new shit and rightly so.
It’s basically a fancy router with 20x NVMe bays. Maybe even qualifies for a low-cost NVMeoF enclosure.
I don’t think using it as a traditional server makes much sense. CPU and memory just aren’t made to handle storage server with 20x NVMe.
I think it’s a great NVMe disk shelf and router.
Valuable for us enthusiasts and home labbers? You can build a cluster and forget about storage on each node and just run NVMe over TCP. Or use it as a “DAS for your NAS”.
Flexible toy indeed. I love Mikrotik for their “hey why not this way? lets do it and see if people like it!” approach.
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Just checked the Block diagram…
The entirety of the 20x NVMe bays are connected by 1x PCIe 3.0 x16 link from the CPU and each NVMe is connected via two PCIe 3.0 lanes via a PCIe switch. So that is a maximum of ~2GB/s per drive and ~14GB/s for the entire storage.
So you won’t get maximum bandwidth, but if ~14GiB/s aggregated bandwidth (a lot!) is what suits your needs (2x 100GbE won’t push much more bits down the network anyway), that’s fine. But it certainly isn’t 20x PCIe 4.0 U.2 drives hooked up to 80 PCIe lanes on an Xeon/EPYC board.
This makes this pretty much the enterprise U.3 version of the Asustor Flashstor.
At a pricetag of 1950$, this is a really good deal for what you get. NVMe backplanes and 100GbE/25GbE ports aren’t cheap and 16 core ARM CPU capable of full L3 routing is worth something.
And you get basically every port and NIC from 100GbE SFP down to 10GbE RJ-45, so it fits into all networks whether you already got 100GbE Fiber or still run on legacy 1G RJ45
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Did the same napkin math yesterday. Someone put some thought into what do do here.
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