[j-nsp] SFP Compatibility

[bill fumerola]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 05:38:47PM -0500, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
>           I heard some grumbling that HP implemented vendor locking on 
> their switches out of the blue with no notice and significant downtime 
> caused to users who tried to upgrade code.

this is true. as i recall, the warning was buried deep in the release
notes (possibly even the release AFTER the code that made devices sad)
and was phrased as a "reliability improvement" or some such.

as always, vote with your wallet....

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 06:07:14PM -0500, Tim Durack wrote:
> I have spoken to an HP ProCurve dude who understands all the arguments
> but says there is no way HP will reverse their decision. I'd like to
> say I could vote with my feet, but it's not that simple. And vendors
> know that...

that's unfortunate. $myjob has switched to force10 S50N switches in the
places we used to use HP ProCurve (top of rack switches for hosts). i'd
like to say it was 100% because of this, but it wasn't. i did stumble
over it when testing some fiber gear using procurves in a lab. one worked,
one didn't. only difference? the code they were running...

in a different role (IX switches) the ProCurves were out of the running
/directly because of this decision/. we continued to buy force10 in that
situation. it doesn't matter, companies that large don't really care
about the kinds of customers a decision like this impacts.

HP ~= IBM ~= Microsoft ~= Cisco. if you're a big enough customer, you'll
get a code release to fix your woes. that is, if you even care enough
to complain.  many companies would just submit the PO to replace all
their SFPs with magic HP ones. do you think Boeing will be switching en
masse to Vista when XP is EOL'd? (hint: msft supports them way further
back than XP...)

back on topic:
the cisco 'no unsupported transciever' debacle was annoying, but at least
they backed off. off-brand SFPs have always worked in juniper for me
over the years.  i believe it's indicative of the kind of company juniper
is and the generally well intentioned engineering decisions they make
(and hopefully will continue to make).

-- bill