Cheap Desktop 400GbE Switch MikroTik CRS804-4DDQ-HRM Review(servethehome.com) |
Cheap Desktop 400GbE Switch MikroTik CRS804-4DDQ-HRM Review(servethehome.com) |
It really is when you're talking 400G.
OK there's very few ports on this, but in general if you're looking at 400g interfaces. $1100 won't even get you a genuine Arista 400G passive DAC.
https://www.fs.com/eu-en/products/82464.html
Claims "Near-Zero Power", but I have zero experience with >100g
Most people probably would use them for something else.
Ultimately this is a Marvell 98dx7335 with a mikrotik management interface on the top. Most switches you tend to encounter use Broadcom chipsets rather than Marvell.
Setting aside what features routeros exposes, This chip seems to be somewhere between a Trident 3 and Trident 4 in capability (hardware support for things like evpn/vxlan, q-in-q, mpls, macsec etc)
Last mikrotik switch I tried only supported PTP Transparent clock, this chip does do boundary clock, but I don't think it's implemented through the linux layer let alone exposed via the RouterOS layer.
I think the chip is mainly aimed at service providers, which fits in well with mikrotik's main customer base (ISPs)
That I can't break down to 10gbit or 1gbit without another switch...
> The list price is $1295, but these often sell at a street price of $1100 or so, making this under $0.70/Gbps
It doesn't work that way...
I like mikrotik, but who is this switch really made for?
I can see a few uses for this: 1) cluster 4x GB10 machines 2) Connect a small group of video editors via 100GbE to a NVMe file server. 3) Overkill home office network, just because.
> We have a number of these now and have been running our RDMA network backend for the 8x NVIDIA GB10 cluster for several months now, using one.
I have a friend who uses something similar for his 4 NVIDIA GDX Spark cluster.
By my math, pci-e 5.0 should do 4x the throughput, so if you had 4 pci-e ssds you wanted to serve over the network and you had the pci-e lanes, you could saturate 400 gbps.
I'm pretty happy with my little baby network with a handful of 10G and 2.5G ports, and I'm cheap so if I made a big upgrade it'd probably be something used that has more 10g ports plus a 40G I could DAC to the adjacent home server ... but my home servers are barely powerful enough to push 10g anyway. (Something like a DCS-7050TX-48 goes for ~ $100 and would be a big upgrade in capacity I don't use over the S3300-28X I currently run)
(tl;dw - guy connects first four DGX and then another 4 "DGX-alikes". Uses 400gbps breakout cables (you can split interfaces, TIL) so he has 2 ports on the first switch, and then gets this one, I believe. You can buy cables that are 1x400 to 4x100gig, etc.