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Comment by OliverGuy | Hacker News Reader

Cisco etc have truly insane pricing on optics, like $1000 for something generic that cost $20-50 from fs.com etc. The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance.

Often Cisco/etc will refuse support cases if you aren't using their optics, if the switches/routers even work with them in the first case, which isn't a given as often they'll refuse to work with non branded optics.

Really just a money grab by the big network vendors.

This box allows you to flash the firmware on the optic to say its from whatever brand you want (Cisco, Dell, Aruba, Juniper etc) so that you can get it to work in that companies switch/router.

For most SMEs, the brand of optics makes no difference. Maybe keep a few legit branded ones around for debugging and when you need to raise a support case. But otherwise, the generic ones flashed to look like branded ones work just fine.

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> Often Cisco/etc will refuse support cases if you aren't using their optics, if the switches/routers even work with them in the first case, which isn't a given as often they'll refuse to work with non branded optics.

As others here have pointed out, Cisco reserves the right to do this but doesn't do it in practice. They don't even have a realistic chance to _detect_ a Cisco-programmed FS SFP, since it simply identifies the same as a genuine Cisco module.

If your case was directly related to the SFP (“I can't get a link on this fiber port”), then yes, they could probably refuse it. But if your case is about basically anything else on the switch, they won't care.

> If your case was directly related to the SFP (“I can't get a link on this fiber port”), then yes, they could probably refuse it.

I have zero doubt they will. But also you prove nothing and are doing yourself and the vendor a disservice if you fake it. There’s no telling what your 3rd party transceiver is doing incorrectly. Better to get one single supported sfp and get that fixed which will probably fix your other issue too.

FS is so big they’re probably fine. Another option is to get one supported sfp, find if it’s encoded to an oem part, then buy and install the oem part directly. Easy to twist the arm of your var to do this.

> But also you prove nothing and are doing yourself and the vendor a disservice if you fake it. There’s no telling what your 3rd party transceiver is doing incorrectly.

If I report an IS-IS problem and the root cause is an OEM SFP on a completely unrelated port, then the design of the switch is pretty awful. :-)

Oh! I’m in complete agreement.

I’ve never heard of a vendor being so difficult. My comment applies only to interface errors. (Up/down status, rx/tx errors, fec issue, etc) Any vendor without an override for 3rd party sfp should be rejected after RFP.

"The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance."

That's not the only difference. I have had situations where I ran equivalent optics side-by-side, and then touched one and it was hot, and touched the other and it was not hot. They do contain different components. In the case of that test - the atgbics SFP was cool, and the other clone unit was hot. My dealer was able to get me in contact with someone technical at atgbics (the cool-running unit) who explained the difference, "The DSP might be say 13nm where more modern more expensive ones are 5nm."

But you definitely do not need to pay for "genuine" optics to get high-reliability optics. You just need to shop around the clones - atgbics is a clone.

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