IBM RackSwitch G8124E (Blade Network Technology)

Overview

The IBM G8124E comprises of 24 SFP+ ports that will run at either 10Gbs or 1Gbs, the switch can utilise the Virtual Fabric capabilities of the Emulex VFA III (Virtual Fabric Adapter) adapters, The switch also has redundant power supplies and fans all in a 1U high device.

The IBM G8124E delivers exceptional performance that is both lossless and low latency. In addition, the G8124E delivers excellent cost savings as you consider acquisition costs, energy costs, plus its feature-rich design with when it comes to virtualization, CEE/FCoE, high availability, and its enterprise class Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality.

 IBM System Networking RackSwitch G8124E

The G8124E switch is designed to support a number of separate types of configurations from a server or downstream switches: 1 Gb, 10 Gb, virtual NIC, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE/FCoE), and iSCSI. This single switch can handle all these workloads and can connect to an upstream 1 Gb or 10 Gb infrastructure, or both.

The G8124E is designed to support data center bridging (DCB), which is the IEEE’s group of protocols that provide Lossless Ethernet and allows for clients to reduce the costs of implementing FCoE by leveraging port aggregation before connecting to more costly upstream gateway devices.

IBM Virtual Fabric helps clients reduce costs and complexity in environments where they need four or more NICs per server. A perfect example is virtualization, where clients often need as many as eight NICs per server.

IBM is a leader in helping clients reduce the complexity of managing VMs and VM migration with their IBM VMready® product, which makes the network VM aware.

Benefits

The IBM System Networking RackSwitch G8124E offers the following benefits:

High performance: The 10G Low Latency (as low as 570 nanoseconds) switch provides the best combination of extremely low latency, non-blocking line-rate switching and ease of management.

Lower power and better cooling: The G8124E uses as little power as two 60 W light bulbs, 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 G8124E rear-to-front cooling design reduces data center air conditioning costs by having airflow match the servers in the rack. In addition, variable speed fans assist in automatically reducing power consumption.

Virtual Fabric: can help customers address I/O requirements for multiple NICs while also helping reduce cost and complexity. Virtual Fabric for IBM allows for the carving up of a physical NIC into multiple virtual NICs (2 - 8 vNICs) and creates a virtual pipe between the adapter and the switch for improved performance, availability, and security while reducing cost and complexity.

VM aware Networking: VMready software on the switch helps reduce configuration complexity while significantly improving security levels in virtualized environments. VMready automatically detects virtual machine movement from one physical server to another, 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, IBM PowerVM®, and Microsoft.

Layer 3 functionality: The switch includes Layer 3 functionality, which provides security and performance benefits as inter-VLAN traffic stays within the chassis. 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: IBM switches interoperate seamlessly with other vendors' upstream switches. For more information, see Tolly Reports: Tolly Functionality and Certification: RackSwitch G8000 and G8124 and Cisco Catalyst Interoperability Evaluation. For more information, v

Fault tolerance: These 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, such as L2 trunk failover, advanced VLAN-based failover, VRRP, HotLink, Uplink Failure Detection (UFD), IGMP V3 snooping, and OSPF.

Converged fabric: The switch is designed to support CEE/DCB 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.

Transparent networking capability: With a simple configuration change to Easy Connect mode, the RackSwitch G8124E becomes a transparent network device, invisible to the core, eliminating network administration concerns of Spanning Tree Protocol configuration/interoperability, VLAN assignments and avoids any possible loops.
By emulating a host NIC to the data center core, it accelerates the provisioning of VMs by eliminating the need to configure the typical access switch parameters.