You'll find SFPs (and related) come in a few different categories:
- Official 100% legit (fully supported, etc)
- resold (used/etc) official 100% legit
- fake "official" (can't tell the difference, stickers etc)
- broken fake "official" (internal rom issues)
- compatible 3rd party
- weird 3rd party (rom issues)
- broken 3rd party
As you can guess, the price drops as you go down the list.
The quality of the vendors can be all over the place, but generally
you'll find that most vendors are okay since there's really not that
many makers in the end.
The rom issues I mention above are generally when the vendor encodes the
device info (model/serial/etc) into the transceiver, they do a bad job
of it and you'll get "interesting" reporting from your gear when it
queries it. (Also the #1 easiest giveaway that the device is fake if
vendor branded)
Most (but not all) gear supports 3rd party optics now (sometimes with a
switch to toggle), with the understanding that the support desk will
have you swap the optics as step #1 when debugging. But with the money
you're saving, you can have onsite spares.
And the "broken" category includes things like optics that work 99% of
the time. (like the time I found one that couldn't transmit multicast
frames..) Note that some gear requires optics with DOM support!
Basically it comes down to this: find a vendor that you can easily
return broken/weird sfps back to and enjoy the savings.
Cheers,
Ross.
On 2015-02-25 2:49 PM, Roy McMorran wrote:
Hi all, a network-slash-purchasing question for you.
Does anyone have any experience using SFPs from third-party vendors in a
Cisco environment? Having recently spent $500 a whack for brand new
genuine Cisco 10Gb modules (SFP-10G-SR in this case) I was pretty
shocked to see 'compatible' SFPs of the same type under twenty bucks
online. Don't know if I'd trust those in particular, but there are
plenty of choices for well under $100.
They're so cheap by comparison I'm tempted to just try a couple, but I
thought I'd see if anyone on the list had any particularly good or bad
experiences with any vendor.
Thanks!
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