Lenovo RackSwitch G8052
Introduction
The Lenovo RackSwitch™ G8052 (as shown in the following figure) is a top-of-rack data center switch that delivers unmatched line-rate Layer 2/3 performance at an attractive price. It has 48x 10/100/1000BASE-T RJ-45 ports and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ ports (it also supports 1 GbE SFP transceivers), and includes hot-swap redundant power supplies and fans as standard, which minimizes your configuration requirements. Unlike most rack equipment that cools from side-to-side, the G8052 has rear-to-front or front-to-rear airflow that matches server airflow.
Key features
The RackSwitch G8052 switch is considered particularly suited for the following customers:
- Customers who want to use GbE in their infrastructure (servers and networking)
- Customers who are implementing a virtualized environment and require multiple GbE ports
- Customers who require investment protection for 10 GbE ports
- 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
- Customers wanting to simplify management by stacking up to eight switches and managing them as a single entity
- Customers who want to implement a converged infrastructure with NAS or iSCSI
The switch offers the following key features and benefits:
- High performance
The RackSwitch G8052 provides up to 176 Gbps throughput and supports four SFP+ 10 Gb uplink ports for a low oversubscription ratio and a low latency of 1.8 microseconds.
- Lower power and better cooling
The RackSwitch G8052 typically uses only 130 W of power, a fraction of the power consumption of most competitive offerings. The G8052’s rear-to-front or front-to-rear cooling design reduces data center air conditioning costs by matching airflow to the server’s configuration in the rack. Variable speed fans assist in automatically reducing power usage.
- VM-aware network virtualization
VMready software on the switch simplifies configuration and improves security in virtualized environments. VMready automatically detects VM 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 affecting performance. VMready works with all leading hypervisors, such as VMware, Citrix Xen, Red Hat KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Layer 3 functionality
The RackSwitch G8052 includes Layer 3 functionality, which provides security and performance benefits and the full range of Layer 3 static and dynamic routing protocols, including Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for enterprise customers at no extra cost.
- Stacking support
Supports up to eight switches that use a single switch image and configuration file that shares one IP address and one management interface for simplified management.
- Fault tolerance
These switches learn alternative routes automatically and perform faster convergence if there is a link, switch, or power failure. The switch uses proven technologies, such as L2 trunk failover, advanced VLAN-based failover, VRRP, Hot Links, IGMP V3 snooping, and OSPF.
- OpenFlow enabled
The RackSwitch G8052 offers benefits of OpenFlow. OpenFlow is the open application programming interface (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 G8052 can be used with any industry compliant OpenFlow controller.
- Seamless interoperability
RackSwitch switches interoperate seamlessly with other vendors' upstream switches.
- Transparent networking capability
With a simple configuration change to Easy Connect Mode, the RackSwitch G8052 becomes a transparent network device that is invisible to the core and eliminates network administration concerns of Spanning Tree Protocol configuration and interoperability and 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.