The Lenovo RackSwitch G8296 that leverages 10 Gb SFP+ and 40 Gb QSFP+ Ethernet technology is specifically designed for the data center. It is ideal for big data, cloud, and optimized workload solutions. It is a full-featured switch that delivers line-rate, high-bandwidth switching, filtering, and traffic queuing without delaying data. Large data-center grade buffers help keep traffic moving, while the redundant hot-swap power supplies and fans along with numerous availability features help provide high availability for business sensitive traffic. The RackSwitch G8296 is ideal for latency sensitive applications such as high-performance computing clusters and financial applications. The RackSwitch G8296 supports Lenovo Virtual Fabric, which helps clients significantly reduce cost and complexity related to I/O requirements of many virtualization deployments. Virtual Fabric helps reduce the number of multiple I/O adapters to a single dual-port 10 GbE adapter and reduces the number of cables and required upstream switch ports.
High performance
The 10 Gb/40 Gb switch provides great combination of low latency, non-blocking line-rate switching, and ease of management.
Lower power and better cooling
The RackSwitch G8296 uses as little power. Unlike side-cooled switches, which can cause heat recirculation and reliability concerns, the front-to-rear or rear-to-front cooling design of the G8296 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.
Lenovo Virtual Fabric
The G8296 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 ports and to create a virtual pipe between the adapter and the switch for improved performance, availability, and security.
Fault tolerance
RackSwitch switches learn alternate routes automatically and perform faster convergence in the unlikely case of a link, switch, or power failure.
Management
Network Address Translation (NAT) allows a single device, such as a router, to act as an agent between the Internet and a local network. This means that only a single, unique IP address is required to represent an entire group of local IP addresses, to the external network. In addition to reducing the number of public IP addresses that are required, NAT also provides security by acting as a firewall between internal and external networks.
Converged fabric
The G8296 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.
