[c-nsp] Cisco and third party transceivers

[Garry]

On 30.09.2011 01:39, Martin T wrote:
> Jason,
> I agree that preferring Cisco branded SFP's gives a sort of quality
> guarantee. According to a friend of mine, those SFP's were bought from
> a electronics market in Moscow:
> 
> http://img.nag.ru/images/18388/101019342.gif
> http://img.nag.ru/images/18388/138043329.jpeg
> http://img.nag.ru/images/18640/2112514702.jpg
> http://img.nag.ru/images/18640/2054988461.jpeg
> 
> ..but manufactured in Asia. On the other hand, there are manufacturers
> like Finisar, Prolabs, Agilent etc, which make decent transceivers as
> much as I have experience. In addition, according to this article:
> http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=102950 ..Cisco buys
> SFP directly from Finisar. Do you see a difference in "Cisco branded
> Finisar SFP" and "Finisar SFP" other than content of EEPROM?

I've one time had a Finisar-labeled and Cisco-labeled SFP in hands ...
you could see they were most likely identical from the PCB routing ...

We've had a good OEM/compatible place for several years now, bought
something like 100+ optics in all sizes and speeds (SFP MM/SM, X2, SFP+
MM/SM), of which some have been operating for 4+ years without any
glitch ... even have 3 years warranty on them, compared to the
"official" 3 months from Cisco or the minimum legal warranty of 2 years
for the original Cisco SFPs.

Interesting side note: in a customer Nexus 5548 we've recently put some
20+ SFPs in (1 and 10G) - along with four copper 10G links for NX2248.
Interestingly, the OEM SFP/SFP+ were recognized as "original" (no
warning, even without "unsupported transceiver"), but the _original_
Cisco copper SFP+ link cables are shown as third party ... (I must
assume they are original, as they were purchased directly from an
official reseller, and the prices match up to the OIP we set up for the
project).

-gg