[j-nsp] Juniper SFP's

[Jeff Wheeler]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:02 PM, Skeeve Stevens
<skeeve+junipernsp at eintellego.net> wrote:
> Juniper are really pissing me off in regards to their SFP's.

Agreed.

> Is there ANY actual difference between these SFP's? They are all the same
> price from the distributor but they all have different availability - see
> number above for example from one of my disties.

Yes.  The QFX3500 actually requires QFX-specific SFP/SFP+ and even the
Juniper OEM ones for other Juniper products will not function in a
QFX3500, at least as of 11.3.  A little bird told me that they will
remove the optics lock-in sometime this year.  The sooner this
happens, the better.

I, too, am not willing to wait for Juniper to supply me with SFPs,
especially since Juniper is honestly pretty bad at supply chain /
logistics, and does not even offer colored SFPs for some of these
products.  Cost is not the overriding concern here, it is
AVAILABILITY.

We literally shipped a QFX3500 to a third-party optics vendor's lab
and had them figure out how to re-flash generic optics so they would
work in it.  This because our SE gave us an incorrect answer about
whether or not it would work with generics -- turns out it doesn't.
One of my clients was so angry about this that they returned some of
their QFX3500s and got their money back over this, and bought another
manufacturer's product instead.

I can only guess that the reason Juniper has different SKUs for the
optics for different product families is that this is the mechanism
they use to credit the optics revenue to the correct product group,
and this must be why the QFX won't work with Juniper optics from other
product lines.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts