RDS2216 and nice to haves that are missing

Hardware
1

Hi,
Thanks you for opening the curtain on this new line of products.
Very attractive, and switch ship is impressive. I have been looking at RDS2216 for a while, but are not making a decision to buy.

If anyone uses it, or has tried it as an email server, would be nice to hear their experience and thoughts. As I am not familiar with ARM processors and what mail servers are ported to ARM architecture, and how they compare to x86 overall. So basically one question that stops me from buying, is availability of applications for ARM.

The second which is very important to me, is the luck of PCIe expansion slot. This, of course comes with the whole question of what is going to be plugged in it, and whether there are Mikrotik drivers available.. . which again brings me back to x86 architecture just for compatibility. A single PCIe slot for a blade form-factor would be sufficient, and here is my use case. I can see using it up as a backup server (and maybe a Mail Server simultaneously, however RAM contrained it may be) with a Tape Library directly attached to it. I think it will make a great 2-in-1 solution actually, serving as a Mail server at the same time. The issue however is that modern LTO libraries come with either SAS, or Fiber Channel. So my HPE 1/8 G2 LTO library happens to have a Fiber Channel and making this all work would require a Fiber Bridge with the whole setup taking 2U space. Which raises a question to going with the x86 architecture and a router in a separate box.

It would be interesting to hear some thoughts on using the RDS2216 as an Email server and and(or) backup solution.

2

Hi,

There are no SMTP servers for ROS. and I doubt any in the near future. You have to install containers for that task.

What backup software do you think is available for ROS? IMHO it's 0 (zero), so how do you want to operate your tape library if only it could be connected directly to RDS?

3

I guess you could run mailcow inside a container.

Keep in Mind this isn’t just a Linux Server it’s a RouterOS Device

4

I understand that any application would have to run in a container. this part is obvious. Of the popular backup solutions Amanda, and Bacula support both, x86/x64 and ARM, but Veeam is X86/x64 only.
Perhaps I am wrong assuming that I could run a full OS inside RouterOS and expect it to passthrough the SFF-8644 SAS interface to the application running inside that OS.

So X86/x64 is safer path, or I am just becoming a victim of ARM trying to push itself into the server space ?

5

You can’t run a full other OS on RouterOS.

And Veeam is a special case too, as it mostly requires Windows.
AFAIK only the hardened repository supports Linux Hosts.

Your requirements just don’t align with the hardware you’re looking at.

6

Thank you