Today’s enterprise data centers and networking environment are upgrading towards the trend of higher speeds, greater scalability, and higher levels of performance. The IT community used to define the upgrade path as from 10G to 40G to 100G. But new upgrade path is 25G–50G–100G with the advent of 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25GbE). How much do you know about 25G transceiver? Will 25G SFP28 dominate the market? Can you clearly tell from SFP28 vs. SFP+, SFP28 vs.QSFP+, SFP28 vs. QSFP28? This post will uncover the answers for you.SFP28 or 25G SFP+, as the enhanced version of SFP+, is designed for 25G signal transmission. Since its transmission rate can reach up to 28Gbps, it is so called as SFP28. The physical structure of the 25G transceiver is the same with the popular SFP and SFP+, but the electrical interface is upgraded to handle 25Gbps per lane. SFP28 can be divided into SFP28 SFP-25G-SR and SFP-25G-LR. The 25G SFP28 SR is designed to transfer data over short distance (up to 100m over MMF) while the 25G SFP28 LR transceiver set for long distance transmission (up to 10 km over SMF).link
With the emergence of 25 Gigabit Ethernet, various 25GbE products are provided by many vendors. For example, Mellanox had already shipped an end-to-end solution with adapters, switches and cables that support 25, 50, and 100GbE speeds. You may also heard “25G Ethernet Consortium”, a community joined by companies like Google, Microsoft, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell etc. So what’s the future of 25 Gigabit Ethernet? What about 25G SFP28?According to the most recent Server-Class Adapter & LANon-Motherboard (LOM) Report from Crehan Research Inc., 25G gigabit Ethernet customer adoption is off to a much stronger start than either 10GbE or 40GbE. 25GbE shipments have handily surpassed two hundred thousand ports in just a little over a year, a milestone that took 10GbE about six years to reach and 40GbE about four (see the following figure). Moreover, each of these successive Ethernet networking technologies has ramped faster than its predecessor in response to changing data center networking traffic demands. Since 25 Gigabit Ethernet develops so fast, as one of the most important hardware for 25G gigabit Ethernet, 25g transceiver will also get a large share of the market.