Key Features - Lenovo RackSwitch G8264CS Product Manual

Key features

The traditional approach of segmenting storage and data traffic has certain advantages, such as traffic
isolation and independent administration. Nevertheless, it also poses several disadvantages, including
higher infrastructure costs, complexity of management, and under-utilization of resources. Customers must
invest in separate infrastructures for LAN, SAN, and interprocess communications (IPC) fabrics, including
host adapters, cables, switching, routers, and other device-specific equipment.
The RackSwitch G8264CS is considered particularly suited for the following customers:
Customers who want to implement a converged infrastructure with FCoE where the G8264CS acts
as a Full Fabric FC/FCoE switch for the end-to-end FCoE configurations or as a Fibre Channel
Forwarder (FCF) NPV Gateway that breaks out FC traffic for the native Fibre Channel SAN
connectivity.
Customers who are implementing a virtualized environment.
Customers who require investment protection for 40 GbE network connectivity.
Customers who want to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve performance while
maintaining high levels of availability and security.
Customers who want to avoid or minimize oversubscription, which can result in congestion and
loss of performance.
The RackSwitch G8264CS offers the following features and benefits:
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, 4 Gb or 8 Gb Fibre Channel connections (or both) and four 40 Gb QSFP+ connections.
The G8264CS switch 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 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 253 W of power, which is a fraction of the power consumption of
most competitive offerings.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
(2 - 8 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 more cost savings through convergence.
Lenovo RackSwitch G8264CS 2