[vcf-midatlantic] SX GBIC fiber cable speed

[Ethan O'Toole]

> If I had a house I would run OM3, I like it better than copper and I
> have no problem spending the extra money on the SFPs.  We have some
> rather long OM3 runs lit with 1MbpsSX and 10Gig SR SFPs. We get our
> optics at OSI and I run Juniper switches.

If I had one I would probably run both, cat5 has the advantage for PoE 
devices.

SFPs should be dirt cheap for anything 10gig and below. The problem on the 
40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit stuff (I think Alex is runing 40 Gig at home?) 
is the normal stuff is all actually 8 fibers in the cable. It really 4 x 
10gig or 4 x 25gig in one module. I assume there are some optics with 
prisms built in that DWDM but probably not $8 on feeBay.

I think my 10gig SFPs were $9 each for Intel or fake Intel. My switches 
usually come from trash piles so the 10 gig ports were SC, but finally 
moving up to LC.

  > We ditched 10G in our top of rack because even at 3m we were having
> issues. We replaced the top of rack from copper to SFP and added intel
> 10G SFP cards on the servers. We use 10Gbps DAC cables for 20G  per
> server.
> All of this is of course personal preference.

Interesting. I know some of the switches don't like copper SFPs that do 10 
gig, apparently they chew a lot of power. Oddly most of my stuff is short, 
but all the cables are Direct attach fiber at 25gig and 100gig.

The vendor lock in on the SFPs is totally annoying though.

         - Ethan