[AusNOG] 3rd Party SFP+ Optics

[Alastair Johnson]

On 3/26/2014 1:41 AM, Julien Goodwin wrote:

> Out of interest, has anyone *ever* had an optic compatibility issue (as
> opposed to say a laser dying or lockout) from one of the top-level
> vendors (ex, JDSU, Finisar) on decent vendor (Cisco, Juniper, HP,
> Extreme, etc.) kit?

I work for a vendor, although not one of those you listed (but I like to 
think we're decent), and I'm speaking for myself.

Yes: I have seen compatibility issues with third party optics in our 
products. These typically have been cosmetic issues, e.g. the optic is 
reporting something strange on the DDM I2C bus (a recent example is some 
10GBASE-ER SFP+ that are reporting jabbers even though the interface is 
running clean).

However, sometimes the compatibility issues are more serious: I have 
seen optics drive excessive CPU load on some switches due to them doing 
very strange things, again on the DDM I2C bus. This has been a 
repetitive issue and even lead to us specifically singling out some 
optics as known to be bad and documenting it.

We don't support third party optics, but we don't stop you from using 
them. However, we won't support faults on them. This has been a 
reasonable compromise for most customers that pursue the third party route.

If it was my network, and I cared about vendor support (i.e. I had a 
support contract!), I would buy genuine from the vendor.

AJ