Networking • Automation • Occasional Podcasting
GitHub Scripts Mikrotik Training
GS gregsowell.com Inside Greg’s Brain
, ,

10Gb Routing and NOT From One Of The Biggies

So I got yet another Vyatta email…they send out a lot of updates. This one was touting 10 gig capability in their 3500 series 2U appliance.

Reminds me of a Jack and Jills from the 70s…hehehe

For the uninitiated, Vyatta is a routing platform built off of open source packages…sounds familiar, eh…hehe. Vyatta configs in files and doesn’t have a GUI and such. They thought a lot of speed. Anyway, back to the point of the post.

They say that you can do 10gig…what would keep Mikrotik from doing 10gig? They would need a 10gig interface for one, right. In steps the Neterion x3110 PCI Express 10Gb NIC.

This guy looks like it MSRPs for around $1000, which isn’t thaaaaat bad. You could snag a motherboard like this that runs around $230. I’m thinking you could pull everything off for less than $3000. 10 gig routing/firewalling for less than $3K is pretty impressive. Of course, MTK would have to add the drivers into ROS, but I assume if you wanted to really do it, they may oblige you.

Juuuust me thinking. 😉

Comments

17 responses to “10Gb Routing and NOT From One Of The Biggies”

  1. N.R. Avatar
    N.R.

    I thought RouterOS already supported some 10G device drivers. Dennis is selling some boxes with such interfaces btw

  2. omegatron Avatar
    omegatron

    I’m hoping whatever replaces the RB1000 has an SFP port to be honest 🙂

  3. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Normis,

    Dennis’ boxes are crazy expensive. I want to do it cheap! hehe.

  4. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Andrew,

    +1 on that request. I would like the new RB1K to have a couple of SFP ports, though I would prefer 4.

    I like using Cisco 355012Gs as the head end at our complexes. You can aggregate all of the building on the 10 fiber ports and use the copper gig ports on it to uplink to the RB1000s. It works a treat!

  5. janiskr Avatar
    janiskr

    well in this page:
    http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Supported_Hardware

    is clearly stated:
    Intel 10Gbit Ethernet PCI Express 3.17 Works

  6. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Janiskr,

    The only problem with the Intel NIC is that they retail for $3K each! Other 10G NICs retail for $1K…which is a substantial difference!

  7. N.R. Avatar
    N.R.

    As we don’t specifically add drivers for any ethernet cards, It’s quite possible that those “other” cards are also supported. It’s just that nobody has tested them. Maybe you can borrow some?

  8. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Normis…Noone is going to let me borrow thousands of dollars worth of equipment…hehehe. I wouldn’t let me borrow them 😉

  9. Jimmy Avatar
    Jimmy

    Buy one and write it off as a business expense (R&D).

  10. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Riiiiight…cause I have that kind of scratch lying around…heh.

  11. Jimmy Avatar
    Jimmy

    You still have 2 kidneys don’t ya?

  12. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    As well as both arms and legs.

  13. omegatron Avatar
    omegatron

    and a fully functioning firstborn you could trade?

  14. N.R. Avatar
    N.R.

    We can add this Neterion X3100 driver, it seems, but we need somebody who can test it. Anyone with an extra kidney? I’m certain we can add it, but we must test it somehow.

  15. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    I might know a guy from whom we could “borrow” a kidney…hehehe. I don’t know anyone doing 10G that would let me throw this into their infrastructure 😛 I wish I did, though!

  16. Nolis Avatar
    Nolis

    Well I really wonder what CPU MT would have to use in order to route all this bandwidth. I am confident 100% that it cannot achieve such a performance. I have a quite massive HP proliant DL585 G2 with 4xDual Core 2.4 Ghz AMD Opteron 64bit and if the packets per second rise at 70k/sec the CPU (sys resource monitor) hits 50% and it seems unable to go any further (Winbox dies, only ssh works). And all this under a small DoS attack with UDP packet flood… Only 50 – 70 MBps traffic. I am a huge fan of Mikrotik, but I think that it needs more than a good software and a x86 server hardware to handle this level of bandwidth.

  17. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    @Nolis

    I think they are working on it. In version 5 you will have the ability to assign a specific NIC to a specific CPU, so this should help rectify these issues.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *