MikroTik RDS2216-2XG-4S+4XS-2XQ Block Diagram
The MikroTik RDS2216-2XG-4S+4XS-2XQ has a wild block diagram. The easy part is the Marvell 98DX4310 switch chip that has 16 ports, twelve of which go to the rear network ports. Four of those ports, however, go to the Annapurna Labs CPU which means we have 100Gbps between the two. That is important since it limits our storage performance to 100Gbps maximum. We also see those numbers decrease if you are offloading networking functions to the CPU from the switch chip.
The PCIe switch has that PCIe Gen3 x16 link over the side PCB. It then breaks out those 16 lanes to 40 lanes for x2 per drive. That means the maximum per drive performance is in the ~12-15Gbps range. Think of the NVMe storage being there more for capacity and having a number of devices rather than for speed.
The M.2 SATA drives are also only SATA II 3.0Gbps not SATA III 6.0Gbps. We purchased some ultra cheap Silicon Power A55 drives to stick in there. (Amazon Affiliate link.)
Next, let us get to the software.
MikroTik RDS2216-2XG-4S+4XS-2XQ Software
MikroTik has a “ROSE Edition” of its standard management suite. You have the option of the console CLI, the WinBox application, or the 192.168.88.1 reachable web GUI. The web GUI is certainly more green in the ROSE edition. Perhaps the most challenging thing from a hardware perspective is the software side. This is a system that is designed to run NAS applications. Perhaps you want to run a Minio server, a simple SMB network share, or even a Nextcloud/ Owncloud server. In the MikroTik world, the idea is that you would use a container.
Still, when you search for docker or container in the interface, that is not there.
Likewise, if you want to setup a SMB share, RAID across the 20 or 22 SSDs, and so forth, the current option is to go to the CLI. Sometimes, the options are also confusing like there is an option to eject the PCIe switch on the NVMe backplane from the web UI. While you can do what you need, and even export drives as TCP NVMe drives (and setup RAID on the remote host) it is a giant pain. We went over this in detail in the video chapter on software.
Aside from that, there are few options for in-context menus. So SMB users who just want to make a NAS RAID array and export it as a SMB 3.0 Multi-channel share, are stuck reading documentation and with the CLI. On the networking side, MikroTik has a great UI, but for the storage side of the ROSE platform, it is just missing.
Next, let us get to the power consumption and noise.
Meh. Albatross.
One would wish for something with more… configurability and modularity.
Also I don’t see the point of thin 19″ rack if this is to be for small customers with specific needs.
Those typically have bottleneck in direct $$$ not enclosure form-factor and height.
I watched the Raid Owl review of this. He never mentioned the hot swap issue. It’s plain as day in the video you can see it reset. What a fing farce that guy is. That’s why I like real sites not YouTubers that you can’t trust
No hot-swap support with 20 drives is just a no-go. This would be awesome with 4x 3.5″ SAS-3/NVMe -or- 10x 2.5″ 15mm NVMe, if hot-swap was available. The 32GB of RAM is also a hard limit regularly these days, so 128GB would be a much better start.
I think the idea is nice for a small company or branch office, the many different high-speed connectivity is a plus for that price point. But it lacking basic enterprise features makes this more of a homelab piece of kit instead of a good choice for businesses.
This one feels a little odd: as a concept it is super lovable: I just hate the branch-office dilemma of either a whole half-rack of underutilized widgets that could support an office twice to ten times the size but just don’t come any smaller except possibly as awful plastic boxes with wall warts and no redundancy; and it’s got that cheerful Microtik pricing and power consumption that isn’t from used enterprise kit 3 generations old.
However, while its concept is the little do-it-all box the RAM and storage are really, really, inflexible for the purpose: even just a plastics kit option that allows you to replace some of the 7mm support trays with ‘every-other’ 15mm support trays would go a long way; and (given that caches and DVRs are two super common use cases) some option to sacrifice SSDs for bulk SATA(either SATA on the ‘every-other’ 15mm or a variant with 3.5in slots) would be an obvious nice to have; and more or expandable RAM would be super helpful: can you get a lot into really thrifty container configs? Sure. If I am looking to equip a relatively small number of branch locations can I afford a fair amount of RAM for what it would cost to either have more talented people configure my containers or have the existing people put extra time into slimming containers down rather than just grabbing defaults and calling it good? Yes indeed; admin time that you’d want doing that can creep up on you fast.
The RAM seems like just a sticking point(though, as noted, the price is right enough just for the switch side of things that you can forgive some sins; it’s just that you are totally blowing past the point if you run out of RAM and need to drag a separate server into it; since the cost of going from zero extra server to 1 extra server will be much higher than going from 32 to 64 or 128GB of RAM; and adding extra RAM will probably be cheaper on the separate server, at least up to 128, possibly not if you need high density DIMMs); but some of the storage-related complaints seem like they could be addressed depending on what, if anything, Mikrotik or others do with those external PCIe lanes.
Normally external PCIe cardcages seem to be obnoxiously expensive(still often worth it if you can now bring that one PCIe card and just a laptop rather than an entire desktop when travelling; or add a GPU or high speed ethernet to a laptop or the like); but expensive enough that they really ruin the numbers on any “let’s use this mini-PC that has thunderbolt or oculink rather than an a mini-ITX or a short depth server that has a couple of card slots!” project; but if Microtik or someone else pop out a few cheerfully priced and relatively simple options that you can use to add some 3.5in SATA mass storage or just a few arbitrary PCIe cards or similar using those external expansion ports that would add a lot of versatility.
Why don’t they just hire @Patrick to make their hardware. If they want to make a NAS or a server it seems dumb not to just hire him and say “tell us what to do” or at least “hey what do you think of this idea?” I’d dream of Patrick designed boxen.
Well, if they hire @Patrick to build the hardware, who’s actually competent enough to fix the software that’s obviously nowhere near what Synology and QNAP offer?
I was thinking they could add some hybrid cages that could either take four 7mm or two 15mm drives. Have two of the U.2 connectors sit slightly further out for the 15mm option and design some slids that can take either one wide or two narrow caddies.
On a different topic, they could have also used SATA drives. 20 of them would give 6*20=120Gbps, which would more or less saturate the 128Gbps of PCIe bandwidth available. Sure, older tech, but would likely use less power and be close in performance.
My biggest issue that’s stopping me from buying one RIGHT now is that it’s crippled by the slow PCIe speeds and bottlenecks. What’s the point of 100Gb/s connections if you can never approach those speeds if the thing is doing pretty much anything else? Hot swap not being a thing is also a no go as I wanted to toss it into my AI environment as a cache but knowing that one drive failure, no matter what, will bring my entire cluster down misses the entire point.
I can deal with the crappy software as I’m perfectly comfortable in a CLI but it also shows that it’s not a fully developed product I think.
I really want to like this thing but for 2k more I can build something similar with none of those issues