The Lenovo RackSwitch G8296 is a cost-effective, enterprise class 10/40 Gb Ethernet solution that delivers exceptional performance, being both lossless and low latency. In addition, the G8296 also delivers excellent cost savings as you consider acquisition costs, energy costs, operational expenses, and ease of use and management. It has a feature-rich design with key virtualization features such as CEE/FCoE, high availability, and enterprise class Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality.
High performance
The 10 Gb/40 Gb switch provides combination of low latency, non-blocking line-rate switching, and ease of management. It has a throughput of 2.56 Tbps.
Lower power and better cooling
The RackSwitch G8296 uses as little as 210 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 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 (between 2 - 8 vPorts) 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 G8296 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 Hot Links.
Multicast
The G8296 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.
Management
Network Address Translation (NAT) allows a single device, such as a router, to act as an agent between the Internet (or "public network") and a local (or "private") 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.
OpenFlow enabled
The RackSwitch G8296 offers benefits of OpenFlow. OpenFlow is the open API that enables the network administrator to easily configure and manage virtual networks that control traffic on a "per-flow" basis. It creates multiple independent virtual networks and related policies without dealing with the complexities of the underlying physical network and protocols. The G8296 is also the ideal switch to use with industry compliant OpenFlow controllers.
