QSFP Cables On the Cheap

[Patrick]

Someone I know may have bought more Mellanox ConnectX-3 cards and therefore needs cables. Found a few interesting ones:

5M FDR Optical Cable - a bit long but not overly expensive: IBM Mellanox QSFP Optical FDR14 Infiniband Cable 5M 00W0073 | eBay

OK here is the risky one: Dell Force 10 CBL QSFP 4X10GSFP Pass 5M Breakout 4X10GB P N HVVVF New | eBay

QSFP breakout cable to 4x SFP+.

Absolutely no clue if any of these will work but am going to give them a try. Put an offer in on four of the optical cables and bought one of the breakout cables.

 

[Chuckleb]

Ha, it looks like you may be doing the same experiment as I am. I ordered 3x of the Brocade 1020 cards today $32 each and a breakout cable at $90 (http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=161186790641).

I am going to try to run a bridged network to see if I can bring the cost per port down of a 10Gb network. This is cheaper than the DDR IPoIB network and quieter too. If this works, then cost per port at 4 ports would be $130 vs $160 for 10Gb vs DDR IPoIB, and at 8 ports would be $92 vs $130 running two breakout cables.