This is Amazon’s first foray in servers, and certainly not the last: MicroTik franken-router is powered by the AWS Graviton 1 Arm CPU waynewilliams@onmail.com (Wayne Williams) | usagoldmines.com

• MikroTik’s ROSE Data Server RDS2216 combines storage, networking, and containers
• It runs on the 16-core AWS Graviton 1 Arm CPU and has 16 ports
• Supports MinIO, Nextcloud, and encryption, with no subscriptions or paywalls

MicroTik, a Latvian company that specializes in networking hardware and software, has launched a new enterprise server, powered by ROSE (the company’s RouterOS Edition for storage and compute).

Described as a “high-performance, all-in-one storage, networking, and container platform for enterprise environments,” the MicroTik ROSE Data Server RDS2216 combines a U.2 NAS, advanced switch, lightweight 16-core 2GHz ARM CPU and 32GB of DDR4 RAM.

The striking green color server, which has 16 ports including two 100G QSFP28, four 25G SFP28, four 10G SFP+ and two 10G Ethernet ports, also has twenty U.2 NVMe storage slots. It supports a number of advanced storage features, such as NVMe-TCP block device export, encryption layers, and modular configurations, with no subscriptions or paywalls. It’s container-ready, seamlessly running MinIO, Nextcloud, Shinobi, Frigate, and other OCI-compliant containers, with additional USB ports for potentially even greater adaptability.

AWS Graviton 1

The ARM chip powering the RDS is certainly one of the more interesting things about the server. The AL73400 is a 16-core ARMv8 SoC developed by Annapurna Labs, which happens to be a subsidiary of Amazon. The chip, also known as the AWS Graviton 1 processor, was originally introduced in 2018 to boost Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

Beyond that, the server has 32GB of RAM (which is a bit stingy) and 128MB of NAND storage. It also features IPsec hardware acceleration, ensuring encrypted connections without performance bottlenecks. MicroTik says the device is rated for 200,000 hours MTBF at 25°C and operates within a temperature range of -20°C to 50°C.

Suggested uses for the RDS2216 include self-hosted MinIO cloud storage, NextCloud enterprise cloud hosting, high-speed backups and database clusters, containerized infrastructure, branch office storage expansion, auto-encrypting storage, and private social media hosting.

Writing about the server, ServeTheHome says, “MicroTik and Ampere have had postings about working together previously. Hopefully that becomes the network side of this with RDIMM support and more. Assuming this sells for under $2000 it might make for a really neat option, but it is also one we want to try before recommending.”

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