3rd party SFP's

DevilWAH

Hi,

I have in the past used some third party SFP's in CISCO switches with out issues, however what are other peoples experiences?

I have about 50 spare LX SFP's that are mostly 3com but some other vendors as well, and am looking to purchase some cisco fiber switches that will need them. Many of the SFP's are still in there packets, so unless I have to I don't want to wast money on a load of new ones.

Thoughts?

Cheers

deth1k

Good luck raising TAC cases with Cisco with 3rd party SFPs in place

Kelkin

ive even seen some cisco switches disable the ports because of it being a 3rd party SFP.

Monkerz

I tried an avaya SFP in a 2960, worked for all of 5 min. I turned off err-disable invalid transceiver, the port didn't err-disable it just went down and wouldn't come back up.

DevilWAH

deth1k wrote: »

Good luck raising TAC cases with Cisco with 3rd party SFPs in place

OH yer I know this one, been there done that , but I have some CISCO SFP's as well, so if they throw up a fuss just be sticking them in to prove my point

DevilWAH

Kelkin wrote: »

ive even seen some cisco switches disable the ports because of it being a 3rd party SFP.

You can force it to over ride this and bring them up.

f0rgiv3n

I've done 3rd party SFPs in Cisco as well as in HP equipment. While I would rather go with the OEM SFPs, they do work if you are on a budget and do the proper planning in case one dies out on ya (Cold spares, etc...). I did run into a problem once where the 3rd party SFP in the HP switch didn't have 100-baseFX power so it couldn't actually reach to where we needed it. They replaced them with no problems, but I thought that was definitely weird :P

DevilWAH

In my case this is a bit of a stop gap solution, over the next year or so, we will be refreshing all the access switches and much of the site fiber, so the intention would be to replace the modules as we do this upgrade. I have the budget to get them, just don't like to buy things that will be redundant in a short time.

f0rgiv3n

If it were me and I had the $$ to do so, I would just buy the OEM version that comes with a warranty and call it a day

sides14

Yeah....stick with the OEM SFPs. I once found an issue in which the 3rd party SFP was only good to 1300nm even though it said it was good to 1310nm. The cost is very small compared to the headache caused by an outage.

DevilWAH

aint it nice when a second project comes along that requires a load of 3COM SFP's as well, so now I have to buy some new, so issue is resolved, buy new cisco and use current spares for new project

DevilWAH

Quick question has any one tried running CISCO SFP's in 3com 4800 and 5500 switchs?

As a stop gap if I can run CISCO in 3COM for a few weeks during a migration project, then I can do away with purchasing about 30 SFP's that will only be used during the migration.

Considering the cost of them would be about £20K I know work would be much happier not to have to get them.

I have three projects going on,

The trouble is two of the projects are going to come in the wrong way round, so that I currently have one lot of 3com switches in production, I will be adding a second bunch followed by a third bunch of CISCO. And then removing the original lot out of production. This will free up a load of SPF's that can be reused as they are all only a year or two old.

What I would like to do it get a load of CISCO SFP's so i can replace the current in productions ones, use those ones that freed in the second project. And then as I put in the Cisco kit and decommission the original 3com switches will free up the cisco SFP's again for it.

So i will end up with 3com in 3com and CISCO in CISCO

f0rgiv3n

I personally have doubts that a Cisco SFP would function correctly in 3COM gear. You could try it with one just to see but I wouldn't count on them being compatible.

7of9

We had an issue in 4800 twingig modules in the 10G ports even with Cisco SFP's. It would disable the port and even after removing the SFP, that twingig would be useless until a reboot. We ended up doing a IOS upgrade which seemed to resolve the issue, but I remember them being touchy.