SFP+

10 Gbit/s SFP+

The SFP+ (enhanced small form-factor pluggable) is an enhanced version of the SFP that supports data rates up to 16 Gbit/s. The SFP+ specification was first published on May 9, 2006, and version 4.1 was published on July 6, 2009. SFP+ supports 8 Gbit/sFibre Channel, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Optical Transport Network standard OTU2. It is a popular industry format supported by many network component vendors. Although the SFP+ standard does not include mention of 16 Gbit/s Fibre Channel, it can be used at this speed. Besides the data rate, the major difference between 8 and 16 Gbit/s Fibre Channel is the encoding method. The 64b/66b encoding used for 16 Gbit/s is a more efficient encoding mechanism than 8b/10b used for 8 Gbit/s, and allows for the data rate to double without doubling the line rate. 16GFC doesn't really use 16 Gbit/s signaling anywhere. It uses a 14.025 Gbit/s line rate to achieve twice the throughput of 8GFC.