- High performance
- Lower power and better cooling
- Virtual Fabric
- VM-aware networking
- Layer 3 functionality
- Seamless interoperability
- Fault tolerance
- Converged fabric
- Transparent networking capability
The RackSwitch G8124E delivers exceptional performance that is both lossless and low latency. In addition, the G8124E delivers excellent cost savings as you consider acquisition costs, energy costs, plus its feature-rich design with when it comes to virtualization, CEE/FCoE, high availability, and its enterprise class Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality.
With support for 1 Gb Ethernet or 10 Gb Ethernet, the G8124E switch is designed for those clients that are leveraging 10 GbE today or have plans to in the future. This is the first top of rack (TOR) 10 GbE switch designed to support Virtual Fabric, which helps clients significantly reduce cost and complexity when it comes to the I/O requirements of most virtualization deployments today.
Virtual Fabric can help clients reduce the number of multiple I/O adapters down to a single dual-port 10 GbE adapter, in addition to reducing the number of cables and upstream switch ports required. Virtual Fabric allows clients to carve up a dual-port 10 GbE adapter into eight virtual NICs (vNICs) and create dedicated virtual pipes between the adapter and the switch for optimal performance, plus higher availability and better security. This functionality provides the ability to dynamically allocate bandwidth per vNIC in increments of 100 Mb, while being able to adjust over time without downtime.
The G8124E switch is designed to support a number of separate types of configurations from a server or downstream switches: 1 Gb, 10 Gb, virtual NIC, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE/FCoE), and iSCSI. This single switch can handle all these workloads and can connect to an upstream 1 Gb or 10 Gb infrastructure, or both. The G8124E is designed to support data center bridging (DCB), which is the IEEE's group of protocols that provide Lossless Ethernet and allows for clients to reduce the costs of implementing FCoE by leveraging port aggregation before connecting to more costly upstream gateway devices.
The G8124E can be configured in "easy connect" mode to allow for transparent and simple connectivity to the upstream network, enabling easy connectivity to upstream Cisco, Juniper or other networks without having to change those networks.
Virtual Fabric helps clients reduce costs and complexity in environments where they need four or more NICs per server. A perfect example is virtualization, where clients often need as many as eight NICs per server. The G8124E can help clients reduce the complexity of managing VMs and VM migration with VMready feature that makes the network VM-aware.