Over the past few months, we have seen a new generation of 25GbE and 100GbE switches come to market based on Marvell switch chips. Those include the MikroTik CRS518-16XS-2XQ-RM and MikroTik CRS504-4XQ-IN. Now, QNAP is getting in on the emerging edge market. The QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X looks like it will be an awesome edge platform.
QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X at Computex 2023
This little switch was sitting on a table at Computex 2023. It may be small, but it has some big features.
This QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X has four QSFP28 100GbE ports and eight 25GbE SFP28 ports.
We also managed to grab a side angle photo.
Here is the other side of the switch. We can see what look like rack mounting ear holes.
The rear of the switch has two fans, an AC input, and two additional ports. Unlike the MikroTik switches, this is a fixed power supply.
At Computex 2023, QNAP told us that this is based on a Marvell switch chip. Also, QNAP said this would have L2 management capabilities. On the back of the switch we have the management port as well as a console port. We found documentation for changing FEC settings in QNAP’s QSS for this switch, so it seems like there will be some management.
Here is the right three quarter shot.
Final Words
This is awesome. We are still waiting on pricing on this switch, but it is great to have an alternative to MikroTik. With another switch available in this segment we get more competition. Also, some organizations that do not use MikroTik now have a QNAP option. Now the big question is whether we can get one for review. We already reached out to QNAP to see if we can review this one, but our sense is that it is not released yet.
We are still waiting to hear of an ETA to the US as well as pricing.
A relevant question for the 100 Gbe age is whether this switch supports the 802.* bits that allow for RDMA/RoCEv2 to work. Any info on that?
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/article/what-is-fec-and-how-do-i-configure-fec-settings-on-my-qsw-m7308r-4x-switch
I love seeing little boxes packed with big interfaces like this, but QNAP has the absolute worst configuration of any switch I’ve ever used after buying a 10gbe one on ebay. They don’t even let you set the management vlan to anything other than vlan 1 for crying out loud! No snmp, no cli (since they removed basic root shell), no (multi) user authentication, just abysmal device to manage or monitor, might as well call it unmanaged.
Wonder if this will ever actually be released