You aren't wrong but honestly I'm having a hard-time envisioning a target audience for this device besides the ardent homelab crowd, or existing Microtik users who just want to eliminate one more piece of gear like a normal CCR from their setup and move it into the server itself. I don't see many "larger customers" moving to something like this instead of competitors. It's not like it's priced out of homelabs; $200 MSRP is the price of an entry level 2x10G Intel card and I'd consider that table stakes for actually adventurous home networking.

The bandwidth on the interfaces isn't high enough to match most enterprise customers needs -- 25GBe/40GBe had pretty marginal market penetration compared to 10G where you don't need hyperconverged solutions, and beyond that most major hyperscalers and others have skipped straight to 100G as far as I can see, to leverage economies of scale. And the CPU complex and ASIC together aren't powerful enough with enough resources to offload serious "service provider compute" workloads to; they even note specifically things like it reaches "line rate with Jumbo Frames", where most of those other solutions aim for line rate @ MTU, so I'm suspicious of that wording. And on top of that you need some actual dedicated engineering (operations, engineers) to utilize a solution like this versus just reserving AWS instances with ENA adapters or whatever. Anything this can do, something like Bluefield will just do better in every way, if you need the hardware yourself.

So I legitimately have a hard time envisioning anyone other than random nerds buying these. Any large customer is probably better off just going with Nvidia (Bluefield) or Intel (Mount Evans). But hey, for two 25GBe ports at the price of a normal 10GBe card, as long as I can pass them through directly I suppose I can handle RouterOS or whatever, and if the software gets more advanced that's cool too. And if it gets more people on the whole converged infrastructure bandwagon, sounds good!

There are more markets than homelab and hyperscale data center, this is solid for software network services at the edge where cost is a concern and flexibility is a plus. MikroTik tends to fill these kind of niches at a cost competitive price point, they don't aim to sell just to consumers or realistically compete with established vendors in the high end segments, just those niche cases they think they can be a low cost option where there wasn't one before.

My hope (once I can actually get my hands on one) is this can integrate well for us by offloading a lot of the routing and NAT type functions for a managed service network offering software based box we sell that handles all of the "smart" network functions at the site + acts as the egress point.

> honestly I'm having a hard-time envisioning a target audience for this device besides the ardent homelab crowd,

1. people running weird janky WISPs, like, two guys and a pickup truck in some very rural parts of the USA. usually very budget limited.

2. small very budget limited ISPs in the developing world.

everyone else in the service provider is not using a $200 mikrotik to do serious routing of >10Gbps of traffic.

> people running weird janky WISPs, like, two guys and a pickup truck in some very rural parts of the USA.

I may have been involved with those guys at some point…

> I may have been involved with those guys at some point…

I would be interested to hear more.

There may be more of us here, even in the FTTH-flavor.

There are some imperfections, mostly related to bonding+ospf and vrrp-grouping but if one does not mind some warnings and a little scripts, one can make things work nicely.

Let's just say that BGP-signaled redundant uplinks and routing as close to the customer as possible are to strive for, instead of starting with a L2 port-isolation-pyramid nightmare.

25 to the server is pretty popular in mid-tier IaaS providers. Means you can use 48x25GbE switches on the edge, which are pretty economical now.

I don't see this card being that popular in that market however; if you want solid tcp offload and asic acceleration there's xilinx cards with a good reputation already.

I think for niche portable use cases this could be very cool or anywhere you are super space constrained.

I agree with you on most points though - and finding good people who know how to even use RouterOS seems like it would be a pain for companies as well.

I've got a few hundred mikrotiks, mainly CCRs and 1100AHs, I guess I could merge my monitoring machine and my router, and it's handy if I just want to deploy a single device somewhere but manage it in the same way (firewalls, vpns etc), it's certainly not something I've being waiting for.

This card could be good if one is leasing rack space so the router now takes up the same space as the server.

It's also worth saying that Mikrotik is a common platform for "homelabbers" who use enterprise-grade (ish) hardware in their homes. RouterOS isn't without its flaws and pain points, but Mikrotik brings high quality features into a low cost package that appeals to many. It's the lesser-known (and polished) brother of what Ubiquiti used to be.

Are you saying lesser known and less polished or lesser known and more polished?

It's lesser known and not as slick (polished) but it is quite capable and a good deal at the price point.

And it doesn't have cloud dependencies to manage it.

I'm sure Mikrotik gear is on plenty of HN (and /r/homelab, et al.) members' home network. It's the budget end of 'serious gear' so there's a decent amount of it in homes, probably rivals (the totally different demographic buying) gamer-marketed consumer network gear.

> this device can handle a lot: firewalls, user management and access control for home media and file servers, and even some traffic control in data centers – without the need for a stand-alone router.

It's definitely got home networks as a target market. It's one of the suggested use cases.