Yeah, seems like many people are leaving the Cisco boat fast, most seem to end up with Arista nowadays

Totally! These are my faves or my fave channel.

Yea but this wasn't always the case and there are still very big devices like those, they just have up to tens/hundreds of 100gbs or 400gbs ports.

Cisco bought Meraki in 2012.

Ah! It's Circuit Paul Ricard in France.

ASICs (well, TCAMs) need instructions what to do too and something has to calculate BGP routes on top of it, this is Layer3 switch :) There is MUCH MUCH MUCH more to a switch then what you have at home built into the widi router :)

Forwarding is done by ASICs, but something has to control those ASICs and program them with forwarding tables and what not. I don't know if these supervisors can do it, but there looks to be a bit of a trend towards supervisor cards being able to run various applications as well. So sticking in a high performance CPU gives you some extra headroom for that kind of thing. Modern routing engine cards for e.g. Juniper MX routers and I think SRX5800 firewalls run a Linux hypervisor with JunOS as a guest. I believe I've also seen the same thing on some QFX switches.

It's going to have to run DOOM at some point obviously

The ASICs are pretty much pattern matching and queuing engines: "if you see this combination of bits, then put the packet in that queue". If an unknown combination of bits is seen, the ASIC passes it to the supervisor, which does a route table lookup and then updates the ASIC pattern matching tables, so future packets can be forwarded without involving the supervisor. The ASICs end up with the patterns for all the most recently seen routes, but the fast pattern tables are limited and these routers are sold for backbone use and are expected to be able to handle the full global BGP route tables, which are up around a million routes for IPv4 alone. Each of these routes represents a set of constantly changing paths and costs, so there's quite a bit of data and processing involved.

Usually monitoring, control, updating routing tables, QoS setup on flows, etc. These switches were designed around 2012, and other probably didn't work too well.

Yes it is.

That's true unfortunately. I never liked Adaptec RAID controllers but hopefully HP changed the firmware... It's a shame... HP was once so proud of it's Smart Array controllers and now this.

Yeah, but they work nevertheless :)

But at least they decided to rewrite each CLI and manuals so none of their slave labour in China is offended by terminology

Yep. To me HP is just a sleazy company that sells crappy plastic printers that require $16,000/gallon ink cartridges.

This is just stupidity. Open loop design. Not even cost saving, just carelessness.

I think with symmetrical data lines they have to be the same length, which is tricky to achieve. You can't just move the caps, unless the parity is maintained.

HP wants to sell the M.2 boot adapters...

Also an interesting issue with many raid adapters is that when a single block goes bad on a disk, the entire disk is marked bad and no longer used. When you have two disks in RAID-1, and one disk has a bad block, that disk is removed from the array and needs to be replaced. When the other disk develops a bad block in another location before you can do that, you lose all your data. Even though it is all still there. I always found that an "interesting design decision"... And of course most of us know that in cases like this, it usually helps to eject and re-place the same (bad) disk, and the data will be copied from the other disk and it again works. When that is such an easy solution, why doesn't the controller software try that by itself? We'll never know...

@@Rob2 shit HP design, they've gone down the drain over the years, no wonder everyone has gone the way of ZFS/BTFRS/CEPH, hell even LVM has better performance and handling

Does hardware raid controllers still make sense? With the filesystems of these days, such as ZFS, BTRFS, etc. is better to handle the redundancy at an higher level. Not only it has a minimal impact on the performance, but is much safer, for example ZFS maintains a checksum of the data, something that typically RAID controllers does not do (that is if you have a disk that is not completely broken, but spits out corrupted data, your data will silently corrupt and you will not notice it till it's too late). Also, good luck if the controller breaks down to recover the data on the drives... To me there is no sense to use a RAID controller, and if there is one (because the server has it already) to not configure it in JBOD and do everything software side. And if someone says "well but Windows does not support it", there is still a sense of installing a Windows server bare metal and not on top of an hypervisor like Proxmox?

@@alerighi Well, one reason I can think of is the support for "just swap the defective drive for a blank one and have automatic rebuild" that a RAID controller offers. I am using BTRFS on my own home system, and while in general I am very satisfied with it, including the support for checksums and the good recovery for single block errors (scrub), I can tell you that the handling of defective drives (and even more the handling of temporarily disconnected drives) really s*cks! Apparently the developers see no priority in fixing that, and who are we to complain about free things...

No ip cam works off ip address analog nvr has no way to communicate

​@@chrisabercrombie4119 What I meant is the aetak 1-port EPoC Tx & the Rx can be used the other way around so from Ip cam to analog cable that goes to NVR ... I ask as I have 8 cameras already in use all analog and im hoping to use one as cat5 or Lan so I can add more Ip cameras to a section of my home without running cable through hard sections ?