[c-nsp] Non Cisco SFP

[Nick Hilliard]

On 02/02/2015 16:46, Warren Jackson wrote:
> 1)  Lack of Cisco support.  You will find yourself behind the eight-ball
> dealing with the TAC if you have these in your chassis.  Sounds like a
> small deal, but I for one don't have the time to deal with it.

You won't run into problems like this unless you have an issue which can
specifically be directly pinned down to a transceiver, in which case you
you can pull out the single OEM cold spare that you need for situations
like this.

> 2)  Cost.  If you buy through a Cisco gold provider then you are going to
> get a good price on the optics

No, you just won't.  You'll be ripped off, consistently and shamelessly.

> enough to where the difference pays off in
> support

We're talking about transceivers here.  If one fails, you throw it away and
replace it with a new unit from your set of cold spares.  It's simply not
worth the hassle going through RMA for something like this.

> as these can been wrapped in through your smartnet converage.  If
> you have optics from another vendor you are dealing with their support and
> Cisco support, keeps things simple. Makes it worth paying the bit extra you
> would pay.  We aren't talking about thousands of dollars difference in
> price here.

Thousands of dollars per unit sounds about right and if you're buying
transceivers in quantity, thousands of dollars per unit turns into real
money pretty quickly.

My staple transceiver these days is 10G LR SFP+.  You can buy reliable,
supported third party SFP-10G-LR compatible units for around €100.  Cisco
charges $4000 list:

SFP-10G-LR=	10GBASE-LR SFP Module	D	$3,995.00

Are you getting 97% discount from Cisco?  If not, you're being fleeced.

> 3)  Who?  Which SFP manufacturer(s) would you recommend besides Cisco?

I buy from Flexoptix: they provide an enormous range of third party
transceivers and a transceiver reprogrammer which is incredibly easy to
use. Everything is done online; delivery is extremely fast and efficient,
and we rarely experience transceiver failures. In every respect, it's a
complete pleasure to deal with them as suppliers.

> 4)  Several of the Cisco SFP's provide the show tranceiver telemetry that
> aid in troubeshooting the physical layer, which you won't get with the
> off-market brand tranceivers.

as others have pointed out, this is factually incorrect from many points of
view.

Nick