Lenovo RackSwitch G8264 Product Manual - Page 6

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The G8264 plays a vital role with Virtual Fabric, which reduces costs and complexity in environments where

four or more NICs are needed per server. An example is virtualization, where clients often need up to eight

NICs per server. For more information, see Virtual Fabric at:

http://www.ibm.com/systems/networking/software/virtualfabric.html

The RackSwitch G8264 offers the following benefits:

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 1.28 Tbps.

Lower power and better cooling

The RackSwitch G8264 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 G8264 reduces data center air conditioning

costs by having airflow match the servers in the rack. In addition, variable speed fans help to automatically

reduce power consumption.

Stacking

With the G8264, a single switch image and configuration file can be used for up to eight switches, sharing

only one IP address and one management interface.

Virtual Fabric

The G8264 can help customers address I/O requirements for multiple NICs while reducing cost and

complexity. Virtual Fabric allows you to carve a physical NIC into multiple virtual NICs (between 2 - 8 vNIC)

and to create a virtual pipe between the adapter and the switch for improved performance, availability, and

security.

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 each VM's network policies 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,

Citrix, Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Layer 3 functionality

The G8264 includes Layer 3 functionality, which provides security and performance benefits, as 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

RackSwitch switches perform seamlessly with other vendors' upstream switches.

Fault tolerance

RackSwitch switches learn alternate routes automatically and perform faster convergence in the unlikely case

of a link, switch, or power failure. The switch uses proven technologies like L2 trunk failover, advanced

VLAN-based failover, VRRP, and HotLink.

Multicast

The G8264 supports IGMP Snooping v1, v2, and v3 with 2 K IGMP groups. It also supports Protocol

Independent Multicast (PIM), such as PIM Sparse Mode or PIM Dense Mode.

Converged fabric

The G8264 switch supports CEE and connectivity to FCoE gateways. CEE helps enable clients to combine

storage, messaging traffic, VoIP, video, and other data on a common data center Ethernet infrastructure.

FCoE helps enable highly efficient block storage over Ethernet for consolidating server network connectivity.

As a result, clients can deploy a single server interface for multiple data types, which can simplify both

deployment and management of server network connectivity, while maintaining the high availability and

robustness required for storage transactions.

OpenFlow enabled

The RackSwitch G8264 is the first 10 GbE switch to offer benefits of OpenFlow. OpenFlow is the new open

RackSwitch G8264