25gbe switches, anyone with a list and pricing?

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Anathematician

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Jan 19, 2017
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Since 25gbe is the new 10gbe, has anyone had any experience with a good 25gbe switch? I’ve seen some posts online that Dell is most inexpensive but not much showing up on eBay yet.

Any recommendations?
 

schujj07

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May 10, 2018
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We run dual Mellanox SN2100's in our colocation datacenter. It has 16x 100Gbe ports that can each be broken down to 2x 50Gbe, 4x 25Gbe, or 4x 10Gbe with breakout cables. With the discount it was cheaper than a Cisco that was HEAVILY discounted. Mellanox Onyx OS is quite a nice GUI to work with and there is a huge online group that will help with administration issues.
 

rune-san

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Feb 7, 2014
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I don't know if you're asking about home use or business use. If it's home use, good luck for Ethernet. 25g is mostly a back-rev to price differentiate between 40G gear and 10G gear. It helps keep 40G gear prices propped up rather than having to lower prices. Kind of like how 10K and 15K spinners keep getting put in SANs to prop up Enterprise SSD prices. Because of that, 25g gear is often newer gen than some of the older 40g stuff, and you might find better prices on first gen 40G gear vs. first gen 25G gear, thought the prices for QSFP cables may eat away some of those saving.

With generous discounts, a Cisco 9300 with Smartnet and a quarter fill of 25G SFP cables will run somewhere around $35K. Your VAR can get better deals than that, but it's going to have to be bundled with a lot more than that.
 

schujj07

New Member
May 10, 2018
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16
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40
I don't know if you're asking about home use or business use. If it's home use, good luck for Ethernet. 25g is mostly a back-rev to price differentiate between 40G gear and 10G gear. It helps keep 40G gear prices propped up rather than having to lower prices. Kind of like how 10K and 15K spinners keep getting put in SANs to prop up Enterprise SSD prices. Because of that, 25g gear is often newer gen than some of the older 40g stuff, and you might find better prices on first gen 40G gear vs. first gen 25G gear, thought the prices for QSFP cables may eat away some of those saving.

With generous discounts, a Cisco 9300 with Smartnet and a quarter fill of 25G SFP cables will run somewhere around $35K. Your VAR can get better deals than that, but it's going to have to be bundled with a lot more than that.
It isn't a back-rev at all, it is the next step in SFPs. There are several changes that were made to signaling and such that allows for 25Gb signal to be sent with the same power and number of wires as 10Gb. This means that 100Gbe uses the same power as 40Gbe, or only 40% the power of 100Gbe from early 2010's that were 10x10Gbe connections. Also QSFP28 and SFP28 are backwards compatible with QSFP+ and SFP+ which means you can get the faster switch and it will still work with the older components. All of these benefits at no more than 10% price increase per port than straight 10Gbe or 40Gbe, for 2.5x the bandwidth. There is a reason why 25Gbe is being adapted faster than any previous standard.

We had a quote out for 2x Nexus 93180YC-FX's with FCOE and support and with the discount was under $19k. However, we would have been a new customer for Cisco and therefore they were willing to give a bigger discount. We went with the SN2100's though as they were a little cheaper, only take up 1U of space, and don't have to worry about being vendor locked on our SPF's from the switch.
 
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Anathematician

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Jan 19, 2017
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It’s for biz, a smallish non-profit ~50 users, but it’s time to replace core switches so why go 10/40 when it’s already a generation behind. Plus NFP pricing on MS Datacenter is pretty cheap so s2d is a possibility too as we get to the next server refresh cycle. But due to the nature of the org $19k on switches is a bit over budget for the project, so might have to go back to the drawing board on it.

Anyone have any good experiences with used switch resellers?
 

fsteresa

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Oct 18, 2016
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Birmingham
The 25G uplink is a cheaper alternative which has becomes the ideal choice with 2.5x bandwidth and lower cost per gigabit than 10G. On top of that, a concurrent network upgrade in the ToR switches will just make the change more compelling.
 
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