The RackSwitch G8264CS offers the following features and benefits:
Lowers the total cost of ownership (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, 4/8 Gb Fibre Channel connections, or both, plus four 40 Gb QSFP+ connections. The G8264CS
switch delivers full line rate performance on Ethernet ports, making 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, along with
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 best combination of low latency, non-blocking line-rate switching, and
ease of management. It has a throughput of up to 1.28 Tbps.
Lower power and better cooling
The G8264CS uses as little as 330 W of power, which is a fraction of the power consumption of most
competitive offerings. Unlike side-cooled switches, which can cause heat recirculation and reliability
concerns, the front-to-rear or rear-to-front cooling design of the G8264CS switch 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 (between 2 - 8
vNICs) and to create a virtual pipe between the adapter and the switch for improved performance, availability,
and security. It is also important to know support for FCoE, as 2 vNIC cans be configured as CNAs to allow for
additional 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 impacting performance. VMready works with all leading VM providers, such as VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen,
IBM PowerVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
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 faster convergence in the unlikely
case of a link, switch, or power failure. The switch uses proven technologies, such as L2 trunk failover,
advanced VLAN-based failover, VRRP, and Hot Links.
Multicast support
These switches support IGMP Snooping v1, v2, and v3 with 2K IGMP groups. They also support 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, invisible to the core, eliminating network administration concerns of Spanning Tree Protocol
RackSwitch G8264CS
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