Did you think about making a CCR that has empty slots for ports?
i.e.
CCR1009-MOD with 3 slots
CCR1016-MOD with 4 slots
CCR1036-MOD with 4 slots (I think that’s max possible here?)
CCR1072-MOD with 8 slots (maybe 2U if it can’t fit in 1U)
and daughter-boards for these slots would be:
MOD-1S+ - 1x SFP+
MOD-4S - 4x SFP
MOD-4G - 4x Copper Gigabit
We’d love CCR1036-8S-2S+, others would probably want some other kind of setup. This would solve everyone’s needs and wouldn’t require you to support (and market) a zillion of configurations.
Modular equipment is expensive because why not. There isn’t any technical reason for it to be expensive.
As to technical aspects, Mikrotik guys already shown that they’re more than capable of making good devices – I’m sure then can come up with a good solution, especially with past daughterboard experience. They came a long way and learned a lot since RB333 times, when for every 10 RBs we bought, 11 were broken
@vortex, I wasn’t suggesting any interoperability with other vendors modules. These would only work with mikrotik’s CCRs to allow more flexibility to customers.
i am totally ignorant about building networking devices, but looking the schematics of Tile Gx chips CCR line is based on looks like that platform are designed for modularity, will be a good idea
looking schematics tile gx 36 and tile gx 72 can exchange 4 gigabit ethernet by each 10g ethernet interface, to build maybe a 32 gigabit ethernet ccr1072 or 4 10gigabit ethernet + 16 gigabit ethernet.
I wrote several times here product names for configurations that would be useful for different reasons.
It would be better to make them fully modular even if for some slots you can only choose between 4x 1GbaseT and 4x SFP. If the price for a module is not too high.
If modular is no go, the first thing that there should be is 2S+ versions for all CPU models, as I mentioned recently.
modularity would be nice for the CCR. Based on Tilera’s specs some of the stuff on it can be made modular while some cant.
A few things that the chip itself has
extra ethernet ports through an interface.
4 fixed interface handlers (you cant make these modular, essentially its 4 ethernet ports/1 10gbe per handler)
Multiple PCIe allowing up to 3 or 4 devices (not lanes)
What disappointed me about mikrotik’s CCR was that it lacked many things especially SATA and PCIe. It had 4 fan connectors but only 2 worked, there was no cutout or a way you could add an additional PSU yourself. The cooling could’ve used a much better design so it would not only be silent but also have better airflow.
Read the TileGX documentation on Tilera’s site. Even their dev devices (rackmount not PCIE) have modularity such as PCIe,
Mikrotik i know a lot of things can make the device cost more but im not asking for dual PSU CCRs, im asking for the option to be able to add fans and PSU and other things so you can keep the base device cheap and it would be up to the customer to expand on these options if they want to.
not necessarily. until you can solve everything in the same SOC, it’s sort of plug and play.
doing distributed stuff, now that’s where the purse opens.
there are obvious tradeoffs when you play around with traces on a pcb and try to replace them
with connectors. as of now, the TILE chips do the stuff all alone. you may expose the XAUI or
sgmii interfaces to daugtherboards, and you can keep the same features as you do have right now.
you may also use pcie lanes, but right now all networking ports are on the cpu, just some “mgmt” gige
is connected to pcie on the 1072.
but i am not a PCB design expert, and bitrates like this have their tricky parts, so it may not
will be that easy as i explained.
on the other hand i can do “modular” CCR. get the 1072, and start adding on crs226s as “port expanders”
to the 10GE ports if you keep two 10GEs for redundant uplinks, you can fan out the rest 6 into 72
almost wirespeed routed gige ports, where the crs just does plain wirespeed forwarding between the
10GE ports and the ethernets. all routing and acrobatics is done on the 1072.
what this concept does miss is the all-sfp switches. you can have the crs210 on a 10ge port with 10xSFPs,
which is nice, but it’s not connected redundantly to the core. and you can’t mount two of them SBS in
a rack. we really need a 24ports SFP switch with 2xSFP+ uplink and proper cooling.
Someone used the CCR1009 with NAT and PPPOE with some firewall and QoS, it used one core to handle 500Mb/s of throughput. So it could handle 5Gb/s with NAT if you didnt need PPP otherwise it would just barely handle it.
