Champion ONE has offered pluggable optics or TRANSCEIVERS to a variety of customer types since the early 2000′s. And since we began offering this product line, we’ve ensured that our products are 100% compliant with the MSA. Of course, the first question is: what does “MSA” stand for?
MSA – An overview
MSA stands for “Multi-Source Agreement”, and it is a document that provides the ‘common’ or ‘internationally compatible’ specifications for systems manufacturers, system integrators, and suppliers, so that they can build both the transceivers and the switch and router (or other device) ports that will interoperate with each other.
Currently, Champion ONE offers transceivers in the following form factors:
• GBIC
• SFP
• XENPAK
• X2
• XFP
• SFP+
As stated above, all of Champion ONE’s form factors comply with their respective MSAs. This means that our transceivers will meet the specifications stated in their MSAs regarding the following characteristics, which include, but are not entirely limted to:
• Mechanical dimensions, tolerances and operation
• Electrical power requirements, consumption, signal communication methodologies and data rates
• Optical power characteristics, signal handling and performances, and error tolerances
The Value of the MSA – Interoperability
The creation and compliance to an MSA is key to achieving uniformity in equipment and allows for the manufacturers of fiber optic transceivers to offer their solution into a variety of switch and router platforms. Unlike vendor- and chassis-specific line cards that offer functionality within a certain platform or product line, a MSA-compliant transceiver guarantees that the same electrical pinouts, modulation techniques, power requirements, and protocol support can be offered regardless of the ‘source’ of the transceiver.
However, within recent years, many switch and router vendors have chosen to use the one component of those ‘specifications’ that is open to modification – the EEPROM that resides inside the transceiver – and add additional information that is queried by the switch or router, making some platforms require vendor-specific information in order to operate. There is nothing in the MSA that says anything about the software of a switch or router, and this exclusion is what is exploited to increase the difficulty of a customer sourcing a third-party MSA-compliant optic.
What MSA Compliance Means To You
As one might expect, this sort of ‘locking out’ of other MSA-compliant transceivers is often met with dissaproval from the end user, who may require a transceiver with functionality, feature set, or pricing that the switch or router vendor cannot offer. This makes designing at the physical layer more difficult, regardless of the feature set the switch or router might offer at higher layers. In general, Champion ONE’s expertise in fiber optic transceivers has made us the ‘standard’ for physical layer conectivity between mixed platforms in our customers’ networks, as we are able to ensure (through testing) that we will interoperate in a variety of platforms, something that switch and router vendors cannot claim of their own transceivers when they attempt to deploy them into a competitor’s port. This ability allows for more flexible layer 1 design options, as well as decreased sparing and part numbers in our customers’ system.