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Nicholas Knight
Asked: 2009-11-10 04:21:54 +0800 CST

CX4/SFP+ -> Fiber adapters?

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I'm putting together a proposal for a greenfield 10GigE network (including 10GigE uplinks to providers) while trying to be careful about budget.

One of the hardware configurations I'm evaluating that would be relatively inexpensive is a blade chassis with a 10GigE uplink module that gives me a set of 2 CX4 connectors + 1 SFP+ connector (there's no good way to substitute a fiber module in this configuration without exploding the budget).

While the SFP+ would be fine IF the datacenter supports SFP+ (which is still pretty new), CX4 obviously isn't going to work for uplinks to providers, and we'll need more than one 10GigE uplink.

HP offers CX4->Multi-Mode Fiber adapters for their ProCurve gear for less than $1000/each. This would be fine, but the problem is the CX4 adapters aren't coming out of HP/ProCurve gear. I can't seem to find non-ProCurve adapters.

So there are several inter-related questions here:

  1. Do the ProCurve adapters work with any CX4 connector?
  2. If not, are there "generic" adapters out there that do?
  3. Are there likewise any SFP+ -> MMF adapters available in case the provider doesn't support SFP+ yet?

Thanks.

Edit: Couple extra details:

  • The blade system is from SuperMicro, and their network modules are visible here: http://www.supermicro.com/servers/blade/networking/
  • I'm trying to avoid having to buy an external 10GigE switch to uplink the blades to.
  • We will eventually probably have to go 10GigE top to bottom (sticking Infiniband modules in the blades for use as 10GigE adapters) and switch to SuperMicro's 10GigE pass-through module with external 10GigE switches, but I want to put that off until the project is showing a return on investment.

Edit II: chris's answer set me straight on SFP+ (for unknown reasons, I'd confused it with 10GBASE-T in my mind). I'm still hoping for a pointer at CX4->MMF converters, however, since one or two 10GigE uplinks through SFP+ won't be enough long-term -- I'm looking to eventually push close to 30gbps out per chassis.

fiber

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm not sure I understand your question.

    I just looked at the manual for the supermicro blade chassis and it supports two network modules, so you'd be able to have 4 cx4 and 2 sfp+ interfaces in your chassis; this ought to provide a reasonable level of redundancy.

    If your provider is offering you 10gigE over multimode fiber, you could connect the supermicro switches to your provider directly using an SFP+ module such as this one.

    SFP+ isn't an interconnect standard. It is a transceiver standard to allow a single device to optionally support any of the available interconnect standards in use (long haul or short haul optical, short distance digital interconnects, etc). 10GBASE-CX4‎, 10GBaseT, 10GBASE-SR, and so on -- these are interconnect standards and each end of a link needs to use the same standard, but it doesn't matter if one end is xenpak and the other is sfp+ or hardwired, or made out of cheese, so long as the media supports the proper interconnect standard.

    So I'm not sure why you need anything else like a media converter.

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  2. Smells awfully like you're looking at the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 interconnects (455880-Bxx) for the C7000 chassis? if so they I'd STRONGLY advise you to EITHER stick to CX4 throughout or go for the SFP+ (presumably 455883-Bxx ?) throughout. We've ran into all sorts of problems when mixing the two and if you moan to HP enough they'll seriously drop their SFP+ prices (they list about $1,319/each but I think we're buying them for about £208/each after discount).

    Hope this helps, come back to me if not.

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