Mailing List Archive

Third party optics
How are your organizations dealing with Cisco equipment and usage of third
party optics?
1) Cisco or "third party"?
2) Cisco policy regarding third party components?

Is it worth the risk?



*https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/warranties/warranty-doc-c99-740959.html#_Toc81362530
<https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/warranties/warranty-doc-c99-740959.html#_Toc81362530>*


*Mike*
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Re: Third party optics [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 02:04:32PM -0400, harbor235 wrote:
> How are your organizations dealing with Cisco equipment and usage of third
> party optics?
> 1) Cisco or "third party"?
> 2) Cisco policy regarding third party components?
>
> Is it worth the risk?

We have a few real Cisco part spares around in each datacenter.
Most optics are 3rd party. (FS)

If there is an issue with support (which does come up occasionally,
but certainly not every case), then we swap in a real Cisco optic part
and continue with the case.


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Re: Third party optics [ In reply to ]
We pretty much do the same thing. A couple of cisco optics on-hand just in
case, otherwise we use 3rd party. A lot of the times, the third-party
optics are coded to look just like Cisco optics, so we haven't even had to
swap them out before filing a case for something. As long as it's not
specific to the actual optic.

On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 2:25 PM Doug McIntyre <merlyn@geeks.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 02:04:32PM -0400, harbor235 wrote:
> > How are your organizations dealing with Cisco equipment and usage of
> third
> > party optics?
> > 1) Cisco or "third party"?
> > 2) Cisco policy regarding third party
> components?
> >
> > Is it worth the risk?
>
> We have a few real Cisco part spares around in each datacenter.
> Most optics are 3rd party. (FS)
>
> If there is an issue with support (which does come up occasionally,
> but certainly not every case), then we swap in a real Cisco optic part
> and continue with the case.
>
>
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Re: Third party optics [ In reply to ]
On 07/09/2021 19:46, Shawn L wrote:
> As long as it's not specific to the actual optic.

Yeah, this is key really. I think in most cases TAC are keen enough to
realise when having third-party optics in a box is or isn't relevant to
the fault you've logged. No-one's going to say, "Oh I think this is a
CEF programming bug- oh, wait, please swap out the FS.com optics first." :)


--
Tom
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Re: Third party optics [ In reply to ]
On 07.09.2021 20:04, harbor235 wrote:
> How are your organizations dealing with Cisco equipment and usage of third
> party optics?
> 1) Cisco or "third party"?
> 2) Cisco policy regarding third party components?
Third party only ... we use programmable optics, which we can flash
ourselves ... saves a lot on inventory, as we can always change to
Juniper (which typically don't care about the programming) or any other
vendor in case a customer needs something on short notice ...
> Is it worth the risk?

Risk? Not really any risk there ... in 20+ years of using third party
optics/SFPs, we've never had an issue with any ... only situation, as
others have stated, could be when opening a ticket with TAC and the
optics aren't reported as Cisco ...

Weird side note: we bought some originally Cisco DAC cables for a
customer w/ Nexus 5k5/2k2 switches ... while the optics were 3rd party
and identified by the system as original Cisco, the original Cisco DACs
are reported as being non-Cisco ... those cables were from our regular
Cisco distributor, I highly doubt they delivered fake 3rd party cables
... (also, they've been working now for 8+ years, so either way, no
complaint here ...)

-garry
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Re: Third party optics [ In reply to ]
On Thu, 21 Oct 2021 at 09:22, <garry@mlfwd.de> wrote:

> Risk? Not really any risk there ... in 20+ years of using third party
> optics/SFPs, we've never had an issue with any ... only situation, as
> others have stated, could be when opening a ticket with TAC and the
> optics aren't reported as Cisco ...

When optic MSA is young (100G still kind of qualifies, 400G
definitely) there are a lot of interop issues, as different parties
interpret MSA ambiguities differently. Copper link-down detection is a
notorious source of issues as well. So certainly the 1st party has a
higher probability of not having interop problems. Over time the
market converges to specific interpretation of MSA and the probability
of parts working together becomes so high you can't justify testing.

Having said that, the only way to actually know what you are buying is
to buy from a 3rd party. Vendor changes the optic without changing
SKU, so if you're doing any type of testing, it's largely belief work
with low utility, as you won't know if the next order is the same
parts or not. It is possible to source from 3rd party in a way where
you know what parts are used and they can guarantee to ship those
parts or notify of changes.

So if you are willing to test and occasionally work with your 3rd
party provider to solve interop issues, I think 3rd party is much more
preferable. If you just want to call a single number and say 'make it
go' and never test, 1st party is better.

The range of ways to source from 3rd parties is large, there are
brokers who ship whatever they can find, there are resellers who
regularly change suppliers, there are resellers who always source from
X if they have the part and then you can buy directly from the
manufacturer. So there is much more room to do 3rd party sourcing
wrong compared to 1st party sourcing. But if you are able to do it
right, it tends to be the superior way to do it.

--
++ytti
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