subrate SFP?

Sat Aug 31 12:47:24 UTC 2013

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Jamie Bowden <jamie at photon.com> wrote:

> > From: Saku Ytti [mailto:saku at ytti.fi]
> Considering that Dell and HP at least are shipping brand new hardware with
> IPMI/BMC/iLO/whatever management ports that can only speak 100mbit when
> every other Ethernet interface in the box at least gigabit, having a useful
> way to talk to that port without having to keep separate switching hardware
> around would be nice.  I'm not holding my breath, but you know, along with
> a pony, this would be nice.
>

Eh?   That may have been the case a few years ago,  but  HP ILO4 and
 iDRAC7  specifically list  10/100/1000 even when using in  dedicated port
mode.

And even in prior versions,  you could have the port linking up at 1Gbps,
 by operating the management in Shared port mode  (Sharing the management
with the server's Eth0).

I expect  over time: support for linking up at 10/100 will get rarer and
much more expensive.

The niche status a 10/100 media converter as an SFP  would have if produced
 is likely to mean it would retail at $2000+ per port device.

It probably just makes more sense to go find an old obsolete  top of rack
switch,  like a Cat3750  to get the small fraction of legacy copper ports
required for  out of band network and server management, which:  by the
way,   should be part of a separate switching infrastructure anyways, to
increase the chance it stays operational and useful for troubleshooting, in
the event the production network experiences outage or has other issues
requiring diagnosis.

> Jamie

-- 
-JH