Dell Network Transceivers

Dell optics span an unusually wide speed range in the second-hand market, because Dell's data-centre switching went to 25G and 100G comparatively early through the Force10 lineage. We stock roughly nineteen hundred transceiver SKUs across the whole range.

Speed tiers and where they sit

• 1G SFP — campus access and out-of-band management
• 10G SFP+ — the workhorse tier; server uplinks and ToR
• 25G SFP28 — modern leaf-to-server, replacing 10G in new builds
• 40G QSFP+ — legacy spine uplinks, four 10G lanes
• 100G QSFP28 — current spine and inter-switch, four 25G lanes

Breakout is where the money usually is

A 40G QSFP+ port can commonly be broken out into four 10G SFP+ links, and a 100G QSFP28 port into four 25G SFP28 links, using a breakout cable or an MPO harness. On a switch with limited port count this is often far cheaper than buying another switch — but breakout has to be supported and explicitly configured on that platform, and not every port on a given switch supports it.

We will not guess at that for you. Tell us the switch model and how you intend to break the ports out and we will confirm whether the configuration is supported before quoting the optics.