RDS2216 - The Ultimate Infrastructure Beast !
Alright, listen up. I’ve seen a lot of so-called “enterprise-grade” devices in my time – most of them either cost more than a small car or come with a subscription that feels like a lifetime gym membership you’ll never escape. But the MikroTik RDS2216?
This beast rolled into my rack like it kicked down the door, slapped my cloud bills off the table, and said:
"Sit down. I’m in charge now."
💾 STORAGE: More NVMe Than I Know What to Do With
20 U.2 NVMe bays. Yes, twenty. I had to sit down when I first saw that.
It’s like MikroTik looked at traditional NAS setups and said, “Why stop at normal?”
You could store a whole country’s memes on this thing and still have room for CCTV footage of squirrels stealing birdseed.
🧠 CPU & RAM: No Chill
16-core ARM CPU, 2GHz, and 32GB of RAM.
This isn’t just a router or a NAS – this is a data-center-in-a-box.
It handles routing, storage, and container workloads without breaking a sweat.
My old server cried in the corner when I powered this one on.
🚀 Networking Like You Mean It
You want ports? This thing is all ports, no excuses.
100G? Check. 25G? Yup. 10G? All over it.
Your switch is now your bottleneck, not this monster.
Seriously, you could run half a country’s internet through this thing and still have bandwidth left to stream cat videos in 8K.
🔋 Power & Cooling: Yes, It’s Loud. Yes, It’s Worth It.
It’s got dual hot-swappable power supplies and ten fans.
It sounds like a jet engine when it spins up – and honestly, I love it.
Every fan spin says, “Your uptime is safe with me.”
📦 No Cloud? No Problem.
This isn’t another “hey let’s offload your stuff to some mystery cloud” box.
This is your cloud, your way, no strings attached.
Spin up Nextcloud, run your media library, surveillance system, backups, heck, even your own little AI models – this thing doesn’t blink.
And no monthly fee just to unlock basic features.
🧠 RouterOS (a.k.a. The Toybox for Adults)
MikroTik’s RouterOS isn’t just an OS. It’s a power trip for sysadmins.
Advanced routing, storage exports, VLAN kung-fu, container support...
It’s like they crammed an enterprise router, a SAN, and a container platform into one chassis and said: “Have fun, nerd.”
🧨 Final Verdict
I didn’t just buy the RDS2216. I adopted it.
It lives in my server rack now, eats workloads for breakfast, and doesn’t beg for cloud credits every month.
It’s not trying to be pretty. It’s trying to get stuff done – and it does it like a legend.
TL;DR:
If you're tired of cloud lock-ins, sluggish NAS boxes, overpriced switches, and underwhelming performance – get the RDS2216.
It’s a gloriously overpowered, unapologetic monster that delivers everything it promises, and then some.
10/10 – would buy again if I had another datacenter hiding under my desk.