[c-nsp] Cheap 10G between 7600 and Procurve 5406zl

[Nick Hilliard]

On 12/03/2010 10:04, Benny Amorsen wrote:
> These days you can get cheap twinax 10G cables with SFP+ at the ends to
> connect two Cisco switches or two Procurves. Short distance only of
> course, but very cheap.
> 
> I would like to connect a Procurve 5406zl which has a SFP+ port to one
> of the 10Gbps ports on a Cisco 7600 RSP720-3CXL-10GE.

As far as I'm aware, HP are particularly crappy about vendor locking their
transceiver ports and will refuse to drive any "third party" transceiver.

> Twinax ends in SFP+, the ports on the RSP720 are X2. Are
> there any adapters from X2 to SFP+?
> 
> Also, twinax SFP+ are manufacturer-specific. Is it possible to get a
> twinax-cable with a Cisco-coded SFP+ at one end and a Procurve-coded
> SFP+ at the other?

It's certainly possible to hack one up, if you have transceiver.

> If a twinax-based solution isn't possible, what is the cheapest
> solution?

One option might be a Cisco OneX Converter, with a procurve twinax sfp+
cable.  There are no guarantees it would work, even if you use service
unsupported-transceiver on the cisco side. However, if it worked, it would
probably be quite cheap.

> http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/modules/ps5455/data_sheet_c78-547521.html

If this doesn't work, I'd say you're going to be stuck with multimode SR
interfaces.  X2 only supports CX4 for copper, but unfortunately, the CX4
form-factor will not physically fit on an SFP+ module.

Nick

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