What is the costs & technical issue with the Cisco SFP-10G-T-X

[ospsms]

Why does a company like Cisco / Meraki not have an affordiable Cisco SFP-10G-T-X that they support?

For the life of me I don't know why Meraki has overlooked this SPF option. On the MS250's & MS125's with SPF ports a customer need to know that the ports were indeed designed to be plug & play 3rd party Mfg's of SPF. That is the whole engineering concept of the SPF technology. Why the hell doesn't Cisco / Meraki address this issue. 

When you need to order SPF for these enterprise switches, you have to pay 1000% markup for the Cisco SFP-10G-T-X that is only supported vs compatible options on the market. 

The gamble is you have play Russian roulette with the 3rd party SPF RJ45 spf's to see if they work.

So either test & support the affordable 3pty SPF 10G-TX options or lower their supported Cisco SFP-10G-T-X price!

Just really disappointed with Meraki and their 10G port offerings... They need in 2026 to add a MS switch to have at least 16/24 -10G Cat6 ports switch for the server back office. Even for a small company 8 server cabinet to interconnect the servers on 10G via a Meraki 10G switch... I have to purchase a TRENDnet TEG-S708 8-Port 10G Unmanaged Network Switch to interconnect the HPE Proliant servers at the 10G bandwidth before it uploaded to the Meraki LAN network via a MS250-24 SPF port.  

Makes no sense, Meraki need to step up their networking game!!! 

[alemabrahao]

Cisco/Meraki devices are indeed compatible with third-party SFPs; I've used them in several projects and never had a problem.

What model/vendor of SFP are you trying to use?

[jbright]

The C9200L-24PXG-4X-M switch is supported in the Meraki dashboard as of IOS XE 17.18.1

It has 24-port PoE+, 8 mGig (10G/5G/2.5G/1G/100M) ports with 4x 1G/10G fixed uplinks, PWR-C5-600WAC

The C9500-24Y4C switch model has 24 1/10/25 GB SFP ports and is also supported now in the Meraki dashboard.

[ospsms]

Interesting ... this helped with learning about Cisco's supported Meraki dashboard conversion of some of the Catalyst 9200L-M switches. Even though we run a full Meraki network at our 2 sites, I still don't see the cost benefits of the 9200L-M plus licensing for our small shop application. Guess we'll stick to the unmanaged Trendnet 8 port 10G switch to tie our servers together with our 10G Backup NAS's then connect to the Meraki network via the MS250-24 SPF+ 10 links.

[jbright]

There is also a smaller switch, 

C9200CX-8UXG-2X which has 4x10G Multigigabit Ethernet UPoE  and 4x1G UPoE ports; 2x10G SFP+ fixed uplink ports; powered using 315W internal power supply unit; fanless.

[PhilipDAth]

>Why does a company like Cisco / Meraki not have an affordiable Cisco SFP-10G-T-X that they support?

This is because the 10GBaseT SFP's maximum power consumption exceeds the power that the switch's SFP port can supply.

Often, a 10GBaseT SFP can be used because it doesn't need to operate at the maximum power limit (maybe you are only using it with a 2m cable in your computer room). Still, because there is a complex set of exceptions, Cisco Meraki doesn't support them as a blanket rule, because they won't always work.

[ospsms]

Interesting... I think this makes me require to research more about the SFP & SFP+ standards in detail and implementation achievements in the marketplace. What a minefield of Gotcha's. 

I most likely mistakenly assume'd Small Form-factor Pluggable would logically attempt to be simple plug & play for optical & wire cable connectivity. But my mistake to think the industry would keep it simple &  instead require this itimate detail compability verification process to choose the correct part# that will guarantee to work.   You have to give it to the technology companies to screw up a good keep it simple plug & play logical design theory!!!

[PhilipDAth]

Are you familiar with TwinAx cables?  e,g.

https://meraki.cisco.com/product/switches/switches-accessories/ma-cbl-ta-3m/

In the Meraki world, these are copper 10Gb/s cables with an SFP+s on each end.  They can only do short ranges (typically 1m to 3m).  These are "low cost".

When you go down this path, ensure that everything has an SFP+ port, and then utilise these.  Compared to 10GBase-T, they have lower latency, making them better suited for storage applications such as iSCSI and databases.

When it comes to 10G connectivity to servers and storage, I mostly use TwinAx cables.

I mostly use fibre for longer links, which tend to be switch to switch on different floors.

[ospsms]

I use TwinAx Cables between the two Meraki near-edge lan switches, MS125-24 & MS250-24 lan uplink between the switches. Then I use the other SFP+ 10G ports directly to the HPE servers with 10G NIC's.  I also have a TrendNet 8 port 10Gb dumb switch which I connect to NAS at one site & to support future 10G Nic servers... At another site same MS250/MS125 near-edge lan I use TwinAx between the switches then a uplink SPF+ 10G to a server rack Juniper fabric switch pair's uplink SFP port & which uplinks to TrendNet 8 port 10Gb-Tx for a bunch of HPE servers with 10Gb nic's, So all the Servers back end is outside/before of the Meraki Dashboard... both sites have numerous down links to Meraki switch Optic/Copper 1G segments to campus buildings and floors & the edge routers to the WAN.