10Gig SFP for 7 Meters

[aamercado]

Not sure if you take other vendors and then “ciscolize” it (ie HP or IBM to MCS Callmanager) but do anyone know if Cisco also ciscolize the SFP cables?

I see 7meter cables available below via other vendors. All the vendors (including Cisco) uses the same Madison 24AWG cable. However, with the transceivers themselves, I couldn’t tell if they all come same vendor or not.

http://www.tmcscsi.com/SFP+_cables.shtml

Anyways, does anyone know why is the 7M available in other vendors but not via Cisco?

Also, is the transceiver really Cisco or some other vendor

[brhedlun · Accepted solution]

To answer this question:

"... does anyone know why is the 7M available in other vendors but not via Cisco?"

As of right now Cisco is the only vendor supporting FCoE on SFP+ copper cables, and Cisco will not certify the 7m passive copper cable for FCoE.  With FCoE, there are bit error rate tolerances that the vendor must be mindful of, and the bit error rate on the 7m cable is not meeting Cisco's strict quality tolerances.

Other vendors that are not currently supporting FCoE, such as HP, do not need to worry about this (yet).

So, if you plan to run FCoE traffic on these cables anytime now or in the future, you might want to stick to 5m or less cables regardless of which vendor you choose, because any other vendor will likely come to the same conclusion as Cisco has already done with support for FCoE on 7m passive SFP copper cables.

Cheers,

Brad