Upgrading the HP 2910al to a 10GbE Fiber Optic Internet Connection
Enlightenment! My first hands on experience with fiber optics and 10Gbps Ethernet
We need more bandwidth. After technical discussions with our data center hosting+ISP, green.ch, we opted to run a 10 GbE fiber optic cable into our rack, rather than expand our 2Gbps LACP bond to 4Gbps which would have only been an intermediate step towards 10 GbE. In the long run, this was the more cost effective, lower effort decision.
Having not worked with fiber before, it's been an educational process. A couple things I've learned that mildly surprised me:
- There are a couple of standards for 10 GbE fiber optic networking, mainly differentiating by how long the cable run is.
- Fiber optic transceivers are crazy expensive--easily equally or more pricy than CPUs by both size and weight. I'm glad we don't need a long run!
- Our switch allows hot plugging of modules and transceivers. If I had known this before it would have saved me a late night trip to the data center.
Doing so required upgrading our switch, an HP 2910al-g24 (J9145A) with an expansion module and a transceiver. The expansion module, an HP 2-port 10GbE SFP+ al Module (J9008A) inserts into the back of the 2910al. And the fiber optic transceiver, an HP X132 10G SFP+ LC SR Transceiver (J9150A) inserts into the back of the module.
The switch has two ports for modules, and each module has two transceiver ports. We still have room to expand! A 20 GbE LACP'd Internet connection in the coming years is not out of the question.
Great stuff.