Brief Introduction to Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch and UniFi Switch

By using just one switch, you can power a number of different devices using PoE. Ubiquiti Network, as one of the most famous American technology companies, who focuses on manufacturing wireless data communication products for enterprise and wireless broadband providers, have offered a range of different switch types and models. Generally, Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch and UniFi switch are two commonly used switch types. Although these two switch types have introduced to the market for several years and have gained great popularity, there are still many people who do not know them clearly. Today’s post will introduce these two types of Ubiquiti switch in the following text.

Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch Overview

Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch delivers forwarding capacity that simultaneously processes traffic on all ports at line rate without any packet loss. It is a fully managed, PoE+ Gigabit switch, delivering robust performance and intelligent switching for growing networks. The Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch targets the Broadband/ISP/Carrier market, which offers an extensive suite of advanced Layer-2 switching features, and also providers Layer-3 routing capability.

Specific Information About Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch

Switching Performance: The EdgeSwitch can provide total, non-blocking throughput: 8-port model up to 10Gbps, 16-port model up to 18Gbps, 24-port up to 26Gbps, and 48-port up to 70Gbps as shown in the following table.

PoE+ Flexibility: The Edge models are available with 8, 16, 24, 48 PoE Gigabit Ethernet ports of auto-sensing IEEE 802.3af/at or configurable 24V passive PoE to simplify your infrastructure.

Fiber Connectivity: The EdgeSwitch provides fiber connectivity options for your growing networks. The 8, 16, and 24-ports models include two SFP ports, providing up to 1Gbps uplinks. For high-capacity uplinks, the 48-port models include two SFP and two SFP+ ports, providing uplinks of up to 10Gbps. Both of these two connectivity options can be achieve by SFP/SFP+ optical transceivers and fiber patch cables.

UniFi Switch Overview

UniFi switch has many similarities as the Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch. It also delivers the forwarding capacity to simultaneously process traffic on all ports at line rate without any packet loss. The UniFi switch range has four models, offering either 24 or 48 RJ45 Gigabit ports, at either 250 or 750 watts as shown in the following table. For its total, non-blocking throughput, the 24-port model supports up to 26Gbps, while the 48-port model supports up to 70Gbps. Different from the EdgeSwitch, UniFi switch targets the Enterprise/SMB market, which is designed for a wider IT audience, and therefore, tend to be simpler, and easier to use.

Features of UniFi Switch

Power Performance: As we have mentioned above, the UniFi switch simultaneously processes traffic on all ports at line without any packet loss. The 48 RJ45-port type delivers up to 70Gbps of total non-blocking throughput, and the 24 RJ45-port type delivers up to 26Gbps.

Versatile Fiber Connectivity: Like the EdgeSwitch models, these two UniFi switch models both include two SFP ports for uplinks of up to 1Gbps. The 48-port model adds two SFP+ ports for high-capacity uplinks of up to 10Gbps, so you can directly connect to a high-performance storage server or deploy a long-distance uplink to another switch.

Advanced Enterprise Switching: The UniFi switch integrates with the UniFi controller software for centralized management of your UniFi devices. Advanced features include static or 802.1x VLAN tagging, port isolation, storm control, and guest/user control, including 802.1x authentication.

Compatible SFP/SFP+ Modules for Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch and UniFi Switch in FS.COM

As we have mentioned above, both EdgeSwitch and UniFi switch require SFP or SFP+ modules to achieve 1G or 10G connections. FS.COM, as a professional supplier and manufacturer of fiber optic cabling products, provides a series of compatible SFP/SFP+ modules for Edgeswitch and UniFi switch, such as Cisco GLC-SX-MM, Cisco GLC-LH-SM for EdgeSwitch, and Cisco SFP-SX-85 for UniFi switch. All of these optical transceivers has been fully tested with these two Ubiquiti brand switch types. If you have related needs, please visit FS.COM, or contact sales@fs.com.

A Brief Overview of 100G Transceivers and Cabling Solutions

Although 10G/40G has become the mainstream on telecommunication network market nowadays, service providers and enterprise data centers are still demanding higher data transmission speed to achieve higher level of performance and scalability, which explains why 100G Ethernet appeared on the scene. According to the statistics from market research company like IHS, 100G becomes a hit in the year of 2016. This post tends to give a brief overview of optical transceivers and cabling solutions for 100G Ethernet.

100G Ethernet Introduction

100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) is the computer networking technology which was first defined by IEEE 802.3ba-2010 standard for transmitting Ethernet frames at rates of 100 gigabits per second. The 100G standards define numerous port types with different optical and electrical interfaces and different numbers of optical fiber strands per port. The mainly used 100G standards are showed in the following table.

100G Transceivers

Optical transceiver is considered to be a key component to ensure the flexibility and reliability of the whole system. The most commonly used 100G transceivers on the market are CFP, CFP2, CFP4 and QSFP28. The following part will introduce them in details.

CFP/CFP2/CFP4: The CFP (c form-factor pluggable) is a multi-source agreement (MSA) to produce a common form-factor for the transmission of high-speed digital signals. The “c” stands for the Latin letter C used to express the number 100 (centum), since the standard was primarily developed for 100 Gigabit Ethernet. The CFP transceiver can be used to support both single-mode fiber, multimode fiber and a variety of data rates, protocols, and link lengths. While the electrical connection of a CFP uses 10×10 Gbit/s lanes in each direction (RX, TX), the optical connection can support both 10×10 Gbit/s and 4×25 Gbit/s variants of 100Gbit/s interconnects. With the improvement in technology, higher-density and higher-performance CFP2 and CFP4 transceivers are needed. CFP2 and CFP4 has the similar electrical connection with the CFP, but they specify a form-factor of 1/2 and 1/4 respectively in size of the original specification. When you use these transceiver modules, you should note that they are not interchangeable, but they can be inter-operable at the optical interface with appropriate connectors. The image below shows CFP, CFP2 and CFP4 transceivers.

QSFP28: QSFP28 is a hot-pluggable, high-density transceiver available in single-mode and multimode versions to support data center, cloud networks, and high-performance computing networks applications. Just as the 40G QSFP+ is implemented with four 10Gbs lanes, the QSFP28 uses four 25 Gbs lanes for an aggregate data rate of 100Gbs. Typically, there are two versions of QSFP28 transceivers, 100GBase-SR4 QSFP28 for short distance data transmission and 100GBase-LR4 QSFP28 for long distance data transmission. The following picture shows these two types.

100G Cabling Solutions

100G Direct Cabling Solutions: There are various 100G direct cabling solutions available on the market. You can choose the appropriate one according to the data transmission distance that you require. For 100G short direct cabling, we can use 100GBase-SR4 QSFP28 and 100G QSFP28 to QSFP28 cables. As we all know, 100GBase-SR4 QSFP28 can support the length of up to 70 m and 100 m over OM3 and OM4 12 fiber multimode MTP cable respectively, and 100G QSFP28 to QSFP28 passive direct attach cable can support up to 5 m, while the 100G QSFP28 to QSFP28 active direct attach cable can support up to 10 m. For 100G long direct cabling, 100GBase-LR4 transceivers (including 100GBase-LR4 QSFP28, CFP, CFP2 and CFP4) are good choices. All of them can achieve the link length of up to 10 km on single-mode LC patch cables. Here shows a Cisco QSFP-100G-CU3M passive direct attach copper cable.

100G Breakout Cabling Solution: 100G QSFP28 to 4SFP28 direct attach copper cable (shown in the following picture) is the commonly used cable type for 100G breakout cabling applications. This cable provides connectivity between system units with SFP28 port on one side and four different SFP28 ports on the other side, which enables higher port bandwidth, density and configurability at a low cost and reduces power requirement in data centers.

Conclusion

People never stop chasing higher speed in every aspect of our daily life, so does in telecommunication networks. After the prevalence of 10G/40G, are you ready for 100G? Through the information that we have mentioned, hope you can get some basic knowledge to make good preparation for the coming of 100G.