Experience Brocade ICX7750 and other vendor SFP

Tue Mar 31 20:06:23 UTC 2015

On 03/31/2015 01:37 PM, Joe McLeod wrote:
> That is true for the ICX as well.

As far as I know, all of the Brocade gear that traces its lineage to 
Foundry will attempt to work with any SFP/SPF+/etc., but you may or may 
not get the ability to use the live optical monitoring option as has 
been mentioned earlier in the thread.  This appears to (should) include 
the entire Fastiron and Netiron family and the ICX families.  I've 
brought this question up with my SE in the past, and the response I've 
gotten is that there is no intent to change this, but they reserve the 
right to deny support for anything believed optic related unless you 
have 1st-party optics.  The conclusion we both reached was that, if you 
want to use 3rd-party optics, it's not a bad idea to have a couple 
suitable "spares" that are 1st-party on hand to test with.

Gear that traces its lineage to Brocade is not always so forgiving.  I 
know the converged NICs will refuse to work with non-Brocade optics, as 
supposedly will their Fibre Channel switches.

I'm not sure where the VDX line ends up in this.  It's apparently 
somewhat the result of actually merging the two technology lines, and it 
runs somewhat different software as a result.

A lot of the 3rd party optic vendors will re-code for either no or some 
nominal charge, so that's always an option.

According to the Brocade SE I talked to, generally either it works up 
front (99% of the time) and has comparable reliability to 1st-party 
optics, or it has essentially immediate problems, so you know to do 
something about it.

Personally, I've used non-Brocade/non-Foundry optics on various 
platforms (mostly Foundry era) with no real problems aside from the loss 
of optic monitoring.  Foundry and Brocade source them from various OEMs, 
seemingly whoever is cheap that day, so this isn't surprising.
-- 
Brandon Martin