Yes. But I like to use original MT-Equipment. They do not test much before release OS and
I’m sure they do not test on foreign HW. And I need small-Boards for usage in
Outdoorboxes (I would prefer DIN-Rail equipment).
For more ports and SFPs, you could use a managed switch with the RB. You’d be limited to whatever speed link you have between the switch and the RB, but you’d get the port quantity and selection you want.
routing AND firewalling AND conntrack AND IPSec encryption AND VLANs AND bridge in hardware
more Ethernet ports and possible SFP (one model 8x Ethernet only, second mixed 8+2 maybe and third 8xSFP only maybe)
USB port for 3G modem for diagnostic purposes
10Gbit Ethernet support
ATM support (after you have SFP, obviously…) so I could throw away this Redback thing
It must sustain wire speed, I can pay more for the hardware, but it has to be capable and reliable. Software too.
Example 1 - one of my customers wants soon to implement IP/TV which means 622Mbit/s stream of data, plus normal 100Mbit Internet, which they will soon upgrade to 1Gbit/s possibly.
Example 2 - other customer separated server LAN from client LAN with RB1000, it’s super secure by using of firewall, what they like, it reaches almost 500Mbit/s peak, but several times they saturated RB1000’s CPU by large quantity of small packets. They also want wire speed connection. I suppose they’ll soon want to use 10Gbps link to servers VLAN.
I can live with 3rd party switches, but “intelligent” work has to be done by intelligent software, which I consider Mikrotik RouterOS.
@chojrak11: that sounds more like jobs for ciscos or junipers, because all these things especially the wire speed won’t happen as fast as you probably need them in the mikrotik-world. maybe they put one rb with sfp-ports on the market, as thats nearly no work to do, but 10gbit on routerboards and asics will definitely take a while. mikrotik is focused on soho-markets and smaller isps.
I’m currently trying to think my way around building a Mikrotik based router with two 10G interfaces, but as
far as my research goes, 10G wire-speed isn’t going to happen, even with two quad-core intel core-i7 processors
with triple-channel ddr3 ram… therefore, if mikrotik is ever going to make the jump to 10G, they would have to bring some asic into place.
Also - please: If you do get an asic in the game, do NOT use slower main CPUs as trade-off.
What good is an asic based router if a large bgp convergence brings the whole device to a grinding halt (see cisco 7600 series /w Sup32)?
At least keep the current proc of the RB1000 in such a future device.
Alternatively - a RB1000 /w SFP and/or ASIC would be a nice box as well. The only thing a RB1000 really lacks right now, is packets per second.
Seriously, I know it won’t happen tomorrow, but we should say loud what we expect.
I moved my focus from Cisco to Mikrotik, as I service smaller ISPs, smaller companies and SOHOs, which can’t afford Cisco, which anyway skins all its customers alive. I avoid anything but Mikrotik because it just works as expected, because its price is competitive, because it has outstanding feature set (which so far fits all needs of all my clients), and because I’m lazy, which means I don’t want to learn any new crappy command line or management interface, or new software bugs. I know what to expect from MT and how to use it in a stable way.
The bad thing (joke) is that these smaller ISPs grow, becoming not-so-small ISPs, so do their expectations for their core equipment. It would be a pity to throw away Mikrotik and put Cisco in this place, because it pops up obvious question “why we didn’t buy Cisco in the first place but wasted money on this?”
Mikrotik has big potential and I’m sure they’ll make new devices that will be more capable. I can see the evolution from 532 boards to where we are now. Their features are amazing, so no problem here. One thing I definitely wouldn’t want Mikrotik people to do is support for exotic protocols like X.25, Frame Relay, exotic routing and so on. Leave that niche for Cisco. Do what’s easy, already explored, and widely used. Which is what I posted earlier (ok skip ATM if you consider it exotic for now)
@hedele: I agree - CPUs in RB1000 should never be slower, no matter how many ASICs will be there!
PoweRouters do not have 10G ports, and they don’t have the power to actually pump 10Gbit..
Maybe the 8-core version of the 2000 series PoweRouter does, but they do not actually provide any performance figures for that - and they don’t offer 10G cards.
Does anyone know which 10GbE Chipsets actually are supported by Mikrotik?
It says Intel 10GbE in the Wiki, but there are at least two different chipsets for that.
For 10GE interfaces router needs 10GE SoC or ASIC but 10G SoCs and ASICs are not to prevalent and cheap…
10GE switching and/or routing on PC architecture (PCI buses) is stupidity.
The issue that you have here, is that the needs dont’ outweigh the deveopment costs of such of units. MikroTik has said this a numbger of times. I expect to see a many port version of the 1000, but I doubt that you will see a huge CPU unit like the PowerRouters. Also, note that we currently have 2242s that can be speical ordered with up to 20 SFP ports! If you are looking for GigE Wirespeed routing, then its there, its inexpesive, and well tested, the 732 has been tested over 15 Million usage hours! These are acutal deployments. We have 4 year old 732s that are still running just fine and have little to no downtime!
So, with that said, there are lots of options, just not in the arena that you are looking for. We do have units running 600-800 meg IPTV and internet options in communities as well. You can do bonding to get plus 1gig BW that does work quite well.
This makes sense to me. So they focus on simpler devices. But I expect they’ll finally have to enter high-end market. It may be 5 year timeframe, but it’ll eventually happen.
Personally I haven’t tested PowerRouter yet, but I have bad experience with other x86-based platforms - for example Advantech so called “Firewall Platform”. It was unstable with RouterOS and 3 of 4 devices failed, last of which no more than 18 months after purchase. Besides it costed TWICE as much as RB1000. I replaced them with a bunch of RB1000 and it works like a charm.
To me it doesn’t matter who brings hardware, as long as RouterOS works flawlessly on it. It may be PowerRouter or anything, I just need it to be stable and efficient, being at the same time cheaper than well-known names (otherwise it’s hard to convince Big Boys to buy it). And I need Mikrotikls people to certify that hardware, so they know it works. This last thing matters equally much.