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I have been upgrading switches at the company I work for and their technology here is prehistoric, but the new switches I have received from my director are the 3COM 2928-SFP Plus. I have been reading the manuals and doing some searching around for an explanation of exactly what the 4 1000Base-X SFP ports are used for. If someone has any good sites or a good explanation as to what these are used for and best practices with these ports I'd appreciate the information. Thanks guys.

1Tguru4l1f3
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I'm not sure what others use them for but we use them to connect switches located in different areas of the building. We ran fiber from the server room to a switch closet at the other side of the building and we connect them via the fiber uplinks.

Jamiko
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  • So basically its just used for faster connection between switches? With switches that have auto MDIX and can just use regular LAN cable will you notice that much of a difference between switches? Where I work we have four switches that have SFP capabilities and I'm wondering if its worth getting the fiber cables and rerunning to the switches not located in the server room. – 1Tguru4l1f3 Nov 10 '11 at 15:32
  • From a little reading I also found that a lot of companies use these slots for connecting servers to switches instead of using regular ports because it increases speed, which leads me to believe that between switches it would increase speed, but I feel like it would just be bottle necked as soon as you hit cat5 again. – 1Tguru4l1f3 Nov 10 '11 at 15:46
  • Yes you can use them for various things such as you mention. I do not use fiber to connect my switches normally, cat5 is fine. Fiber just works better for long distances. – Jamiko Nov 10 '11 at 16:26
  • Thanks for you feedback! Just out of curiosity when you say "long distances" practically speaking what is the point in which using fiber versus cat5 will make a differences? – 1Tguru4l1f3 Nov 10 '11 at 16:36
  • Cat5 can handle just over 300 feet or so (100 meters) without issue. I don't really think it is worth paying for the fiber stuff if you don't have the distances required. It's kind of fun to play with though. – Jamiko Nov 10 '11 at 20:36