[j-nsp] juniper-nsp Digest, Vol 111, Issue 33

[Chris Gapske]

OK

I used to work for TWO different switch vendors


Third party optics are for the most part not the optics that fail tests.  Those are usually labeled refurbished.  I know JNPR ,CISCO and others do not like to support other vendor optics.  So keep a set of theirs around.  You should always have a spare set. Light level testing is a must when using them though if you want to compare. 




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Subject: juniper-nsp Digest, Vol 111, Issue 33

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Sources for SFP+ optics (Saku Ytti)


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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:52:51 +0200
From: Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi>
To: juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [j-nsp] Sources for SFP+ optics
Message-ID: <20120223165251.GA26112 at pob.ytti.fi>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On (2012-02-23 08:27 -0800), Bill Blackford wrote:

> ok, I shouldn't post something I'm clearly not prepared to provide 
> empirical data for. This is what I've heard and I've certainly 
> experienced results that support this notion.

I've heard the same, from my router/switch sales people. I'm sure many of them honestly believe that and don't intent malice.

Buying 3rd party can be done in many ways. One way is to use broken who uses many sources to find what you need. They can offer very good price and can rapidly deliver say any DWDM colour for any form-factor.
But they have no idea what they are delivering, it's almost drop-shipping, will the DDM work? How well the I2C channel works all together? Newer routers poll I2C aggressively and some SFPs answer too slowly.

Another way is to use shop which does nothing but optics and as such are subject matter experts. Uses single source for single part-number. Who has access to various vendors routers and switches and knows before shipping that it'll work on your gear. These are marginally more expensive than the brokers when buying one unit at a time, and they might have 7-8 week lead time (factory lead time) for stuff no on shelf (like certain DWDM colour)


Now I've always been curious, why does this market exist? It would be excessively trivial to crypto-sign the SFP, maybe some already are. Which means you'd need to copy the eeprom contents from official optic to make it work, and you couldn't deliver two eeproms of same value to same customer (as vendor could prohibit two optics with same code working in same router).
Yet optic vendors even give you USB eeprommer boxes, where you can on-the-fly code your optics to fit another vendors router/switches, where they are seen as official optics.

Possible reasons the market exists

1. Legally required by some customer contracts. Some customer requires 2nd source?

2. Fear for anti-competitive behaviour?

3. They know some are ghetto enough to go with the copy-eeprom way of thinking and want piece of the action and are selling crypto-keys to make 'official' optics?

--
  ++ytti


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