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GBIC the gigabit interface converter is a standard for transceivers, commonly used with Gigabit Ethernet and fibre channel. By offering a standard, hot swappable electrical interface, one gigabit Ethernet port can support a wide range of physical media, from copper to long-wave single-mode optical fiber, at lengths of hundreds of kilometers |
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SFP is the small form-factor pluggable or Mini-GBIC is a compact, hot-pluggable transceiver used for both telecommunication and data communications applications. It interfaces a network device mother board (for a switch, router, media converter or similar device) to a fiber optic or copper networking cable. It is a popular industry format supported by many network component vendors. SFP transceivers are designed to support SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and other communications standards |
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SFP+ is the module standard developed by the ANSI T11 fibre channel group and now the most popular socket on 10GE systems. SFP+ modules do only optical to electrical conversion, no clock and data recovery, putting a higher burden on the host's channel equalization. SFP+ modules share a common physical form factor with legacy SFP modules, allowing higher port density than XFP and the re-use of existing designs for 24 or 48 ports in a 19" rack width blade. |
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XENPAK is the most mature and widely deployed of the various 10 Gigabit Ethernet MSAs. It is the only MSA that can support all 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard interfaces (none of the others support 10GBASEER) and for that, is the MSA of choice for Ethernet switch vendors. |
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X2 is a smaller version of XENPAK that is targeted at the same market as XPAK. It competes directly with XPAK and there is some desire for the X2 and XPAK MSAs to merge. XPAK This MSA was pushed heavily by Intel and Infineon for use in PCI applications, as it is fully compliant with PCI height, width and bezel requirements. As a result, this MSA is almost exclusively targeted at the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) or Host Bus Adapter (HBA) market. In other words, this MSA will be used to provide pluggable optics on an adapter card that would slide in to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet server or NAS device. |
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XFP can best be described as a small form factor pluggable for 10 Gigabit Ethernet. It is to a XENPAK what an SFP is to a GBIC. XFP is the least mature of the various MSAs and is designed for “next generation optical transceivers”. Its main advantage over the other MSAs is its size (allows for higher 10 Gigabit Ethernet port densities) and lower power consumption. However implementing an XFP based solution is also more complicated than XENPAK. |
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