Many clients successfully use Ethernet and Fiber Channel connectivity from their servers to their LAN and SAN. These clients want to reduce the cost and complexity of these environments by using the capabilities of Ethernet and Fiber Channel convergence. The Lenovo RackSwitch G8264CS top-of-rack switch offers the benefits of a converged infrastructure. As part of its optimal design, this switch has the flexibility for growth and expansion. It is ideal for clients who want to connect to SANs and clients who want native Fiber Channel connectivity, in addition to support for such protocols as Ethernet, Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and iSCSI.
Lowers the TCO with consolidation
By consolidating LAN and SAN networks and converging to a single fabric, clients can reduce the equipment that is needed in their data centers. This benefit significantly reduces the costs that are associated with energy and cooling, management and maintenance, and capital costs.
Improves performance and increases availability
The G8264CS is an enterprise-class and full-featured data center switch that offers high-bandwidth performance with 36 1/10 Gb SFP+ connections, 12 Omni Ports that can be used for 10 Gb SFP+ connections and four 40 Gb QSFP+ connections. It delivers full line rate performance on Ethernet ports, which makes it an ideal choice for managing dynamic workloads across the network. This switch also provides a rich Layer 2 and Layer 3 feature set that is ideal for many of today's data centers. Combined with redundant hot-swappable power and fans and numerous high availability features, this switch comes fully equipped to handle the demands of business-sensitive traffic.
High performance
The 10 Gb/40 Gb switch provides the perfect combination of low latency, non-blocking line-rate switching, and ease of management. It has an extra high throughput.
Low power and good cooling
The G8264CS uses a little amount of power and features the convenient cooling design that reduces the costs of data center air conditioning by having airflow match the servers in the rack. In addition, variable speed fans help to automatically reduce power consumption.
Support for Virtual Fabric
The G8264CS can help customers address I/O requirements for multiple NICs while reducing cost and complexity. By using Virtual Fabric, you can carve a physical dual-port NIC into multiple vNICs and create a virtual pipe between the adapter and the switch for improved performance, availability, and security. With support for FCoE, two vNICs can be configured as CNAs, which realizes cost savings through convergence.
VM-aware networking
VMready software on the switch simplifies configuration and improves security in virtualized environments. VMready automatically detects virtual machine movement between physical servers and instantly reconfigures the network policies of each VM across VLANs to keep the network up and running without interrupting traffic or affecting performance.
Layer 3 functionality
The G8264CS includes Layer 3 functionality, which provides security and performance benefits, because inter-VLAN traffic stays within the switch. This switch also provides the full range of Layer 3 protocols from static routes for technologies, such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for enterprise customers.
Seamless interoperability
The G8264CS switches perform seamlessly with other vendors' upstream switches.
Fault tolerance
The G8264CS switches learn alternative routes automatically and perform fast convergence if there is a link, switch, or power failure. The switch uses proven technologies, such as L2 trunk failover, VLAN-based failover and VRRP.
Multicast support
This switch supports IGMP Snooping v1, v2, and v3 with 2K IGMP groups. It also supports Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM), such as PIM Sparse Mode or PIM Dense Mode.
Transparent networking capability
With a simple configuration change to easy connect mode, the RackSwitch G8264CS becomes a transparent network device that is invisible to the core, eliminates network administration concerns of Spanning Tree Protocol configuration/interoperability and VLAN assignments, and avoids any possible loops. By emulating a host NIC to the data center core, it accelerates the provisioning of VMs by eliminating the need to configure the typical access switch parameters.
