I'm in the process of a hardware refresh at my company, and we're sticking with Lenovo SR630 servers because we find them reliable. However, I've noticed that the network cards supported for these servers don't seem to accommodate LR SFPs for 25 Gbps connections, primarily supporting multimode fiber instead. The same situation appears for 10 Gbps where only one LR transceiver is available. Is it uncommon to use single-mode fiber for connecting servers to network switches, or is this specific to Lenovo? Also, how popular is the use of BiDi SFPs in servers?
4 Answers
What distances are you planning to cover? Could you possibly use DAC connections for the servers linking to switches and then run single-mode for connections between buildings? That could be a solid setup.
The use of LR single-mode fiber is a more recent trend, and it might be that suppliers haven't fully caught on yet. Though it seems like LR optics would fit in and work fine, Lenovo hasn't officially tested or documented this. Also, keep in mind that while single-mode fiber is great, a lot of people still use twinax DAC within racks because it's cost-effective and doesn't require vendor-branded optics.
In my experience, we primarily use LR optics everywhere. We standardize with mostly 10G-LR but we do have some 25G-LR as well. The great thing is, if you go through a supplier like Fiberstore, their prices are so reasonable that it makes it easy to set up a network with LR optics.
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