As the title says, most of the stores are either out of stock or have no plan to restock them. Can you guys recommend me any trusted place where I can preorder them or order them?
Where in the world are you located and is there any particular model switch you are looking for, there are at least three models from MikroTik that works.
I looked at the CRS804 DDQ, but they are out of stock in my area. What other switches can be used?
You have CRS812 for 6x 200G links and CRS504-4xq-in for 4x100G links.
The CRS504-4XQ-IN will not cause any bottlenecks on a 4 spark cluster?
I let you do your own research, just search for crs504 and you will find a lot of posts from users happily using them.
Thank you for the response. I already did some reading and from what users reporting no difference in decode speed but a 10-15% drop in prefill. Since there are not many options I will probably go with the CRS504, thank you a lot for recommending that.
BH Photo will have them. They might be out of stock from time to time, but they come back on stock fairly quick. I was able to get 2 of them in different times without many issues. Wait time usually a few days for stock.
The CRS812 too?
Yes, that is actually easier to get from my experience.
Just to chime in with some personal experience:
- I paid full listing price to buy a CRS804 from an eBay vendor last week when it was OOS everywhere. CRS812 is priced the same, but usually is sold with a $100-$200 discount. I paid $200+ extra for CRS804 instead of CRS812, hoping to afford 4 more nodes.
- CRS804 is load! Now, I need to afford a bigger house to put it away.
- CRS504 would not have allowed me to setup one of my 4TB node to export a NFS mount for other 1TB nodes. So, I am glad at least I didn’t go with CRS504.
What kind of limitation did you hit there? Trying to understand this particular use case.
Thanks for the info on this thread. In case anyone in the US is interested I just picked up this for $599 MikroTik CRS504-4XQ-IN 4-Port 100G QSFP28 Cloud Router Switch with RouterOS v7
Is there a particular cable spec I should be looking for. The ones sold alongside the Spark is very short and expensive.
QSFP112 Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cable
Is that definitely going to get me the right thing? Does anyone know?
You want a QSFP28 DAC that costs peanuts compared.
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CRS504 would not have allowed me to setup one of my 4TB node to export a NFS mount for other 1TB nodes.
Sorry, I’ll walk back on this statement. It’s too strong. The original consideration was for a clean network topology configuration, using the second port/cable on the NFS server node to serve the export. For reference, after initial NFS tuning, my NFS node can hit 50Gbps (as shown on the switch dashboard) when 3 client nodes are pulling weights from it at the same time. If I am serving other model at the same time, do I have to think about potential network traffic contention over the self-introduced 100Gbps limitation on a switch that saves me $400-$500 (vs CRS812) over my $20k investment? If that $20k is already a sunk cost, consider otherwise :-) That’s just why I personally ruled it out.
I found the CRS812 locally after calling a lot of stores. Now I am wondering, is the CRS804 better for multiple sparks or can both handle larger setups 6, 8, 12? I used the search function but some people that bought the CRS812, regretted not waiting for the new CRS804. Is it better suitable or just cheaper?
I can only get the CRS504 and CRS812 locally. Currently having 4x Sparks, but thinking about upgrading to 6x 8x or more in the future. Would love to hear some recommendations.
I have both CRS812 (personally) and CRS804 (offsite). For CRS812, I have been able to just get a cluster of 8 sparks in the past, but possibly breaking out the other 2 200gbe ports, can get 4 more in. My personal use, I haven’t found 100Gbps to be a big deal.
CRS804 just gives you more 400Gbe ports, at most gets you 16 if you do 4x4x100Gbps. But most will likely want to try 4x2x200Gbps.
What I like about the CRS812 is the flexibility since I get a mix of 400Gb, 200Gb and 50Gb ports, heh.
Anyway, I have cared less about the switch and more about just getting the cluster to stay stable for myself personally. With a lot of Sparks, 1 problematic one can raise the anxiety levels.
Thank you so much - I’m getting 97.98 Gb/s symmetric through the switch vs 99.9 Gb/s with the direct cable. The cables you recommended were $36 vs the short stubby cable they sell to ‘connect two sparks’ at $170 or something ridiculous like that - crazy! I’m now on the path to getting 3 and the later 4 sparks online!
Thanks again!
I’m glad it worked and tbh, the regular stubby DAC cable is QSFP112 designed for carrying 4x100G signals, overkill and the reason for the wild pricing. When you only need to run signalling that is 4x25G it suddenly is a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture.