A Look Inside A Switch

in STEMGeeks2 days ago

If you enjoyed the last time I opened up a switch to show the innards, this might interest you too, same thing again.

This time, we are going inside a Mikrotik CRS-317-1G-16S+. It's got 16 SFP+ ports which for a total switching capacity of 160gbps. Pretty tiny these days honestly. But it's under $300 new so for that, not bad.

The front of the bad boy

The ports

The ports are fairly standard. Just 16 of them all in a row. Nothing fancy going on here.

The guts

Here's the inside of this thing. Very simple. Nothing can be upgraded. I think everything is on a SOC that's under the heatsink. Very simple design with only 4 cables, 2 for fans, and 2 for power.

Power Supply under here

The power supply lives under this big sliver thing.

Side view of the power supply

The power supplies aren't hot-swappable. If one fails, you are going to be using the other one until you can replace the whole device itself. Again, remember the price point we are at for this device, and things make sense.

The heatsink

I love the copper connecting to the fins for removing heat in the back. Very simple design, yet it works. This thing has never gotten hot on me.

This used to be live and serving traffic in the past, but has since been replaced with an Arista. Now it lives under my bed at my parent's house and I get to see it whenever I come back. One day I'll probably take it and utilize it somewhere. One day.