Maybe. But if you notice, there are no other switch manufacturers in the universe that cool the switch chip with a passive radiator. If that was a good design, wouldn't other have tried it before or copied it after?The fan on the MikroTik CRS317 is there to remove heat from the SFP+ cages, not for the switch chip.
I'm not bashing the switch. If it were being used as a high performance access switch, I would say that it's a great buy. If you are like a content creator like Linus Tech Tips and you have a bunch of editors who need a high performance connection to a central server for editing, it's a fantastic buy. If you are a home user who wants more performance, its also a fantastic buy. But it's not a datacenter switch.It isn't the best switch in the world, but it's low power and can be quiet. Under $800 and you can get two for redundancy. I'm not sure about exchange rates, but MikroTik can get very close to giving you two for that budget.
As for the buying two of them idea. Sure, maybe. But how do you design that architecturally? How are you load balancing your production traffic at L2? Lets say you build a dvswitch in VMWare that has a few different VLANs on it. You need to assign uplinks to those port groups. You can't do a LAG across both switches, so you have a single interface going to each, and in VMWare you fail over from one to the other. But now you are losing capacity. You can assign both uplinks as "Active" and do mac-hash load balancing, and sure that will work and will help increase your capacity. But now you have two links with traffic going across them with no redundancy.
If we use the car analogy, the Mikrotik switch in question is a '95 Civic Hatchback. It's light, it's nimble, and you dropped in a turbocharged H22 motor so it's fast. Maybe even 2 fast
A real datacenter switch is more like a Ford Raptor R or Dodge Ram 1500 TRX. They are work horse trucks, but they also go fast.
Do you see how that's not the same thing? My argument isn't that MikroTik is necessarily bad (although the vulnerabilities in RouterOS do not give me the warm and fuzzies), my argument is that you should buy the right tool for the job. You can open a can of vegetables with a steak knife (ask me how I know!) But can openers exist for a reason.
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