[c-nsp] 6500s/XFPs (Was XENPAK 10GB-LW (WAN PHY))

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 11:19:02PM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> EW. X2 is Xenpak in another form factor and most likely has the same 
> pricepoint.
> 
> I also haven't seen anyone but Cisco 4500 BU use X2 so that doesn't bode 
> well for the price to go down either.

Well, a bunch of folks I know are using the HP 6410cl-6xg 6-port X2 
switches and swear by them, but the future of 10GE networking they 
certainly aren't. The only other place they make sense is stuffing them 
into legacy or stackable systems which can't support XFP. Cisco sells the 
X2 modules it does have at the exact same price as XENPAK at least.

The real problem is I'm not aware of anyone even making ZR/ZRD/LW/etc in 
X2 form, let alone anyone selling them to end users. This means there is 
no way serious networking using X2 could be contemplated in anything under 
1 year. Even if they started developing and selling all of the missing 
optics, by the time they roll out XFPs are going to be signifiantly 
cheaper and more dense. In the WAN PHY department scaling XENPAK/X2 is 
pretty much hopeless, there is only so much you can do to make them price 
efficient compared to XFPs. Personally I think you'd have to be crazy to 
invest in X2 infrastructure at this point.

BTW today the list price difference between LR and LW xenpaks is $10k ($2k 
vs $12k respectively). Compare this to being able to use the same XFP to 
support both, at around the $2k mark (or less), where the cost of the 
framer is theoretically shifted from the pluggable to the host. Of course, 
essentially every high end (not counting some of the lower end stackables 
which happen to have an XFP port) 10GE XFP based platform today supports 
LAN/WAN PHY already, either by default or for a difference per card that 
is in the $1k/ea or less range.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)