Lenovo G8264 Product Manual page 6

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 6