A major project to migrate to new Datacentres within the next 12-14 months has started, as part of it there are 9 x 1Gb links which are currently under 10km to become greater than 10km in distance. There will also be 10Gb links but Juniper at least has 10Gb 40km & 70km SFP's available.
I have found out that Juniper don't make 1Gb SFP's greater than 10km, what would be a recommended third party SFP solution? The other issue is that I have mixed Cisco/Juniper switching and in my reading the Cisco 1Gb SFP's(1000BASE-EX) require a 5db inline optical attenuator at each end which I will have some of but the other end of the link could be a Juniper switching solution, still waiting on quotes however as price in this case will determine the switching solution for the new primary datacentre it is still not fully determined.
If Juniper does come out as most cost effective, one option was to run a VC across the fibre to the secondary DC as well as our head office as all three sites will have redundant geographically diverse fibre paths. Is there any gotcha's about running a VC across WAN links, currently my VC's are all local to the rack but if I do this then I can look at reducing spanning tree requirements, hopefully.
The 1Gb links are purely for end site connectivity which is currently in place as I stated but at the moment all distances are less than 10km, in many cases less than 5km. I don't want to have to put in 10Gb links for an office of 3 people for example. As I said many of these sites have Cisco switching in place therefore the connectivity between the Cisco & Juniper I am also concerned about being over the 10km mark with the requirements around the inline attenuators on the Cisco end and the lack of Juniper SFP's on the other(well assuming third party certified solutions could be available).
Thanks in advance....
John