Sonnet is well-known to be one of the leaders when it comes to equipment for pro users in the audio, video, and broadcast industries and their newest device is quite cool: the twin 10G SFP+ Thunderbolt 2 to dual-port SFP+ 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adapter which is a cost effective solution for adding faster network to Mac and Windows powered systems that feature Thunderbolt 2 or Thunderbolt devices.
The twin 10G SFP+ adapter is an easy way to connect systems limit by its native network connections to the much faster 10Gbps systems and due to its clever design, it is even upgradable to Thunderbolt 3 and 40Gbps connections down the road. The tiny chassis features an active fan that is said to run whisper silent and as such not limit the position of the device and the same goes for its compact size. It is equipped with two SFP+ sockets, allowing users to select either short-range (up to 300 meters) or long-range (up to 10 kilometers) SFP+ transceivers, and connect their computers to a switch or other 10GbE interface via LC fiber optic cables at long distances.
Thunderbolt has the advantage that it allows daisy-chaining of up to six devices via a single port and this adapter won’t limit that as it comes with two ports. Connect one to the system and connect the rest of your Thunderbolt devices to the device. The two LAN ports also allow for trunking and link aggregation for the best connection and throughput possible. Best of all, it doesn’t require any extras and can be configured through the native OS X network control panel or Windows Device Manager.
“With the high bandwidth and cost effectiveness of 10GbE networking, modern video production and graphics facilities and many other businesses are increasingly adopting this fast standard for wired networking to support specialized applications, such as HD video editing using high-performance shared storage systems. Few computers offer a 10GbE interface, but all modern Macs and many Windows computers offer a high-performance Thunderbolt 2 interface,” said Robert Farnsworth, CEO of Sonnet Technologies. “As a follow-up to the tremendous success we have had with our Twin 10G 10GBase-T product, our new Twin 10G SFP+ dual-port 10GbE Thunderbolt 2 adapter provides users who need to connect through a fiber optic network infrastructure with a powerfully simple and cost-effective way to add fast 10GbE connectivity to their computers.”
The Twin 10G SFP+ (part number TWIN10G-SFP-TB2) is available now for $669 USD. Short-range 10GBase-SR SFP+ transceivers (part number G10E-SFP-SR) and long-range 10Base-LR SFP+ transceivers (part number G10E-SFP-LR) are available for $69 and $149 each.
