On 8/29/13 6:08 AM, Saku Ytti wrote:
How do people deal with situation where you need <=48 SFP/SFP+ ports, but you occasionally need one or two cu 10/100 ports? arista 7050s support 100 Mb/s on their copper sfp I have leveraged that, if you can break out the 40Gb/s ports you have as many as 64 ports of 10Gb/s. there are other switches that I've seen do this but they're not common.
My problem is mostly around PDU/CDU management, in racks that otherwise would be 10Gb/s only and in general I've addressed it with dedicated switches that support many of these devices rather than just two.
For some reason it's becoming quite rare for SFP port to natively support 10M and 100M rates.
Technically obviously solution to me would be subrate SFP, which presents itself as 1GE to host, offering 100M or 10M to client. This would obviously break QoS at the host as host would still think it's 1GE and SFP itself would need to drop+buffer. But for my applications it would be fine, the 10M or 100M ports are typical some MGMT access interfaces. I can't imagine such SFP being complex or expensive, considering we have E1 over IP in a SFP, which includes control-plane and forwarding-plane inside SFP form-factor
Is this demand peculiar? Could I source such SFP somewhere by showing there is demand?
Putting 2 port switches or fibre converters with external PSU just to support few ports seem dirty.