I have an application where I want to use a GigaBlox SFP as the main switch but also need a GigaBlox in a sub assembly.
Yes, you can absolutely cascade them.
– Can you connect them in series?
Yes. You can connect a standard copper port on a GigaBlox to a 10/100/1000BASE-T port on the GigaBlox SFP board. From an Ethernet/switching perspective, that is a normal switch-to-switch uplink.
– Will there be any reduction in performance on the GigaBlox?
Not in the sense of the GigaBlox itself being “degraded.” It will still switch traffic normally. The practical limit is the bandwidth of the interconnect between the two switches.
If the link between the GigaBlox and the GigaBlox SFP is 1G, then all traffic flowing between those two switch domains shares that 1G uplink.
So if devices on the sub-assembly GigaBlox are talking to devices or uplinks on the main GigaBlox SFP, the bottleneck is the uplink between the switches, not the switch silicon “slowing down.”
If traffic stays local on the sub-assembly GigaBlox, then that traffic is not impacted by the upstream link.
So the short answer is: no inherent performance penalty, but the uplink capacity becomes the throughput ceiling for traffic crossing between the two switches.
– Can you connect a GigaBlox port into a 10G copper SFP module in the GigaBlox SFP board?
No, the SFP port on GigaBlox SFP only supports 1000BASE-X SFP modules. A 10G SFP generally uses 10GBASE-R, so that won’t work. Use a 1G SFP, and make sure that the 1G SFP supports 1000BASE-X.