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by wmf 15 days ago
Support brackets would be 10x cheaper than fiber.
3 comments

Admittedly I'm not buying Enterprise Grade(TM) stuff, but...

For simplicity I just use 10G LR modules everywhere. A pair of fiber transceivers is $25. Pretty sure last batch of 3M pre-terminated fibre cables I was grabbing were like $3 a piece or something. So we'll round up and call it $30.

I can get a 3M DAC for about $20.

So yeah it's cheaper, but the price isn't _that_ different. I was using DACs in quite a few places (and still am), but in general I've found it easier just using fiber. (For one, I've had a few devices that didn't get along with various DACs but worked just fine with the fibre transceivers.)

The fibre and sfps are a tiny price of the entire solution

DACs will be cheaper than fibre in a bay, but between neighbouring bays about the same.

A 7m passive 40g qsfp dac is £80. A pair of multimode 40g is £66 and 7m multimode cable is £10.

A 2m dac is £28, so fibre is 3 times the price.

And an extra £40~ per server is irrelevant if we're worried about an outage on £500k-£1.5m of gear and the services they provide.
If you do it only once and would never touch it - yes.

But the time spent on digging around and occasionally debugging what and where exactly came off and no longer links (at best) or there is still link up but the are too many errors, add some SLA on top of it... No.