Investment Protection - HP GbE2c Specifications

High availability and resiliency
The GbE2c provides a full set of advanced support
for high availability and resiliency features such as
Spanning Tree, Rapid Spanning Tree, Multiple
Spanning Tree and Uplink Failure Detection. High
availability ensures that mission critical traffic is not
impacted in the unlikely case of a switch or power
failure. Overall network performance and bandwidth
conservation can be boosted with IGMP Snooping,
which only forwards multicast traffic to the clients that
have expressed interest in receiving such packets.
GbE2c's IGMP Snooping capability not only
improves the overall bandwidth but also conserves
CPU cycles of the servers, thus avoiding the cost of
unnecessary server upgrades.
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Uplink Failure Detection (UFD) supports network
adapter teaming, and allows the switch to
monitor specific uplink ports to detect link
failures. When the switch detects a link failure,
it automatically disables specific downlink ports.
The corresponding server's network adapter can
detect the disabled downlink, and trigger a
network-adapter failover to another port on the
switch, or another switch in the chassis.
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Compatibility with Cisco® EtherChannel for
trunking to non-HP devices,
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802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) ensures
that only one path to a destination is available
at any one time by detecting loops and
blocking switch ports as required.
•
802.1w Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP)
offers fast convergence - reducing packet loss
and downtime in high-availability and high
resilient networks. GbE2c's industry-standard
based RSTP offers instant failover to secondary
links in an unlikely event of primary link failure.
RSTP is an enhancement to the 802.1d
Spanning Tree Protocol and offers improved
spanning tree convergence time when network
topologies change.
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802.1s Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP)
provides seamless integration, resiliency and
availability for network topologies utilizing
Virtual LANs (VLANs) into networks running
802.1s. MSTP enables networks to utilize
individual uplinks for separate VLANs, thus
improving the overall performance of the
network. MSTP also enables Network
administrators to map multiple VLANs to a
reduced number of Spanning Tree instances to
provide multiple forwarding paths and load
balancing for data traffic.
•
Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP)
Snooping allows the GbE2c to intercept IGMP
packets to build multicast tables for hosts that
want to receive or stop receiving multicast
streams. Networks that experience heavy
multicast traffic benefit from the ability to "prune"
the traffic so that it travels only those hosts that
require that multicast frames.
•
Compatibility with Cisco® PortFast feature
allows a port to transition rapidly to forwarding
state upon bootup, without the usual Spanning
Tree calculation period that may cause some
applications to time out.
GbE2c deployment applications
The HP GbE2c Switch is an ideal choice for the HP
BladeSystem because of its port density,
price/performance ratio, high availability, and
advanced Layer 2 feature sets. The GbE2c offers
advanced Layer 2 features including extensive
support for VLANs, Spanning Tree, Uplink Failure
Detection and Link Aggregation (compatible with
Cisco® EtherChannel).

Investment Protection

The base configuration for GbE2c provides full Layer
2 functionality. For customers looking for more
advanced features, now or in the future, the GbE2c
is software upgradeable to add Layer 3 features
including Quality of Service (QoS), dynamic and
static routing. QoS enables enterprise customers and
service providers to run prioritize traffic such as VoIP
and Video Conferencing over less time-critical data.