I haven't kept up with the pricing for the last decade, back when I was working with it was a fraction of the cost of comparable Ethernet. Maybe things have changed drastically though.
On the used market I'm sure you can get some decent kit for a homelab. But if you want a production environment, with anything close to the latest speeds (≥100G), you can't get gear for love or money: all the Big Players are taking all the inventory, so lead times are slightly ridiculous (assuming anyone has stock).
We were looking at IB in Feb 2022, and the earliest for IB switches was Nov-Dec 2022. We ended up going a different route for other reasons, so I haven't kept on lead times, but it would not be surprising if things were roughly the same.
Also hard to get from vendors: wait lists for >100G switches is a long time. No one has them in stock: probably because LLM is what all the cool kids are doing, so all inventory/production has been spoken for.
jpgvm|2 years ago
throw0101c|2 years ago
On the used market I'm sure you can get some decent kit for a homelab. But if you want a production environment, with anything close to the latest speeds (≥100G), you can't get gear for love or money: all the Big Players are taking all the inventory, so lead times are slightly ridiculous (assuming anyone has stock).
We were looking at IB in Feb 2022, and the earliest for IB switches was Nov-Dec 2022. We ended up going a different route for other reasons, so I haven't kept on lead times, but it would not be surprising if things were roughly the same.
throw0101b|2 years ago
Also hard to get from vendors: wait lists for >100G switches is a long time. No one has them in stock: probably because LLM is what all the cool kids are doing, so all inventory/production has been spoken for.