[ausjke]

Mikrotik was pre-Ubnt and had excellent hardware lineups. These days Ubnt is miles ahead in the router/wireless-board field, which puzzled me.

While Mikrotick sells its RouterOS, it's not that hard to install Openwrt on it. Ubnt was quite Openwrt friendly at the start, not so any more.

These days I'm just assembling my own x86 routers. PCengines and Soekris do not have the best performance/price ratio nowadays, and they somehow just feel a bit out of date.

[sathackr]

I have personally deployed about 100 Mikrotik routers and can say they work well for what they do.

They're not designed to be a home router and the learning curve if you want to use one like that would be similar to someone without Cisco IOS knowledge trying to configure a Cisco IOS device as a home router.

Not many routers can do 5-10gb/s+ throughput for the price. Their most recent model has 8x10Gb ports, costs USD $2,500 and will route the full 80gb/s [1]

They have come a long way since the RB433 and running on Soekris/PCEngines boards. UBNT is just getting started in the real router field(Not their Radio-with-a-router, those are quite mature now but very limited in features) and I do not care for their current EdgeRouter UI. It's a mess. For example: You need local access just to add the interface you're accessing it from to a bridge. (Because you can't add an interface WITH an IP on it to a bridge, and you can't remove the IP from the interface without losing access. You can apply multiple commands at once, but the command validation doesn't honor the order that you enter them, thus tosses an error because it tries to add the interface to the bridge before removing the IP)

Sure you can put something x86 together and run one of the many many firewall/routing OSes, or even roll your own with (pick your flavor)Linux, Zebra and IPTables, but I don't have time to make something work and prefer something that just works and isn't priced at the Cisco/Juniper level.

I wouldn't recommend either for mission-critical ENTERPRISE grade routing, without significant planning into redundancy, but, if you are doing things at that level, then you probably have the funds to purchase enterprise grade gear.

[1] http://www.stubarea51.net/2015/10/09/mikrotik-ccr1072-1g-8s-...

[walrus01]

"Their most recent model has 8x10Gb ports, costs USD $2,500 and will route the full 80gb/s"

No, it won't route 80Gbps, because any single flow on a CCR uses a single core on their multi core Tilera CPUs. The CCRs struggle to really do 10Gbps of real world IP transit traffic.

If you're pushing 5Gbps+ of your customers' IP traffic in a daily sine wave pattern to/from upstream and adjacent BGP peers (paid IP transit and peering at a local IX), and have $2,500 to spend, you will be MUCH better off buying a proper routing platform that has things like hotswap fan trays, hotswap 1+1 or N+1 power supplies, redundant hotswap routing engines, etc. You can do this with a used/refurb Cisco or Juniper for the same price as the higher end Mikrotiks. I can build a Cisco 7604 or 7606 with dual RSP720 for less than $2000.

The CCRs have a single motherboard in them that is about the same quality as a $85 PC motherboard. If you're running an ISP that is moving multi-Gbps of customer traffic and have potentially thousands of singlehomed customers downstream of you, do you want to rely on a 'core' router that has absolutely zero hardware redundancy?

Mikrotiks have their place at edge and small aggregation but when you start talking about things that are $2,000+, please, buy a real router.

[sathackr]

What ISP needs a single flow to exceed 1gb? I would venture to say most non-storage networks don't have single flow requirements in the Gb/s.

I can buy 3 CCR routers and run OSPF/BGP/etc... on them to provide redundancy. The likelyhood of all 3 failing at once is slim and I'm still an order of magnitude cheaper than an equivalent Cisco/Juniper setup. Yes, dynamic routing takes a few seconds to converge, so an unplanned failure will result in a short disruption in connectivity, but planned maintenance can be done seamlessly, including power supply replacement(since only one model has hot-swappable power supplies). I do not deploy any single-power models and have not had a single router fail in the 2 years I have been deploying them. I have had a $6500 Cisco ASA fail, twice.

I am a fan of all 3. Cisco and Juniper make great equipment. So does Mikrotik. Each one is a tool that must be used properly and the right one needs to be selected for the job and requirements.

[walrus01]

Thing is, it's not an 'order of magnitude' different in price... Three $2500 CCRs vs, what? I know somebody who recently bought a whole Juniper MX960 for around $10,000. For a serious ISP that is a big jump in capability and resiliency.

If looking at used/refurb core routing platforms these days, anything that is not capable of being upgraded to a reasonable density of 100GbE is selling for very affordable prices now. Even systems that are fully modular and redundant and capable of more than 60 10GbE interfaces in one chassis, such as the MX480 or MX960. Or an ASR9006/ASR9010 with first generation linecards.

[sathackr]

I'm seeing used, empty, MX480s in the range of $13k on ebay[1]. Plus $3k for add in 10g cards[2]

And I have to pay for support if I want to get updates, security patches, etc... [3]

And I need 2+ of them if I want to multi-home.

So I'm buying a used device of unknown history, that someone is selling for unknown reasons(could be a working pull, could be something with an obscure problem that will surface 3 months later), without a hardware warranty or support, with outdated software, and going to trust my entire network with it and it's internal redundancy. If I could get 3 for that price I might consider it.

I like the SpaceX approach. Don't trust one big expensive engine to get you where you're going. It probably won't fail, but if it does, you're toast. Trust 9 cheaper ones and have enough redundancy that if/when one does fail, you shrug and keep going and just replace it before the next launch.

[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/221776643106

[2] http://www.ebay.com/itm/122004198861

[3] http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/en_US/release-independent/ju...

[FireBeyond]

Comcast fiber is 3gbps (sold as 2gbps) and provisioned via a Juniper box to you which acts a bridge alone, with SFP+ port giving 2gbps, and a GigE port separate.

[sathackr]

That still doesn't define a requirement for >1gb/s in a single flow.

A flow is a single connection, such as downloading a file from a single IP address.

When you download a single file from multiple sources (such as with Bittorrent), each connection to each source is a flow.