What is the best and not expensive way to connect a Juniper EX4500 to a X1107A Chelsio PCI Netapp card?
Will these do (10GBASE-SR) for both end? and then connect with fiber cable? How important is it to get original ones from Juniper and not compatible ones? Should the transceiver on the X1107A be different? Distance between devices is ~10m
Thanks!
You asked specifically for the "cheapest" way and I'm going to do you one better and make it simpler.
If the distance isn't too great, I'd get what's referred to as a "DAC (Direct Attached Copper)" or sometimes called a TwinAx cable, this is a copper cable with an SFP+ transceiver built in to both ends. They're pretty cheap, and easy to replace. "Passive" style won't go as far as "active" style ones.
Here's an example: http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=12053
Past that, you could alternatively get 10Gb-SR transceivers for both ends, and run multi-mode fiber between them and it should work just fine. You do not HAVE to use "Juniper" transceivers, but you'll definitely want to get ones that are "compatible" with your hardware, they can be quite finicky. Furthermore, by going non-OEM, support is not required to help you in some cases.
According to this data sheet, the NetApp 10GbE NICs only support SR fiber optic connections, with a maximum distance of 300 meters using OM3 cable and 550 meters using OM4 cable. It means the NIC does not support LR optics, so you can use SFP+ SR optics at both end, and then connect multimode fiber with LC connectors. SFP+ copper twin-ax cable is also a decent choice, but you should consult the switch vendor’s documentation to make sure the twin-ax cable you select is approved for use with that vendor's product.
10GBASE-SR is a good choice for this connection. But when consider cost, the distance(10m), it seems more acceptable to select SFP+ DAC (direct attach copper version). Since the transceivers on ends of DAC are not real one, SFP+ DAC is cheaper than 10G optical moduels, say 10GBASE-SR optics. It's true that the original ones from Juniper are really performance-assured, but when you find a reliable third-party supplier(say, Fiberstore）, you can enjoy the same functions as provided by Juniper while spending less.
