Note:

• The full product specifications below are from the manufacturer and may contain information related to other package quantities that will not apply to the product that you are reviewing. Please confirm the actual content and/or package quantity from the main product specifications page.
• These specifications may represent the entire product series/model/line to which this product belongs with specific configuration differences between the individual products stated.
• These specifications may have been copied from the same product in other region/country in which case there might be minor differences in region-specific data such as Input Voltage, Terms of Warranty etc.

Features and specifications

Note: The features and specifications that are listed in this section are based on Networking OS 8.3.

The RackSwitch G8124E has the following features and specifications:

• Form factor: 1U rack mount switch:
  • RackSwitch G8124E Rear-to-Front version for ports in the rear of the rack matching System x®, ThinkServer®, BladeCenter®, and Flex System™ designs
  • RackSwitch G8124E Front-to-Rear version for ports in the front of the rack matching airflow of iDataPlex and NeXtScale System designs
• Ports:
  • A total of 24 ports for 1 Gb or 10 Gb Ethernet SFP/SFP+ transceivers (support for 1000BASE-SX, 1000BASE-LX, 1000BASE-T, 10GBASE-SR, 10GBASE-LR, and 10GBASE-ER) or SFP+ direct-attach copper cables. SFP+ modules and DAC cables are not included and must be purchased separately (for more information, see Table 3).
  • 2x 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports (RJ-45 connector) for out of band (OOB) management
  • One RS-232 serial port (Mini-USB connector) that provides another means to configure the switch
• Scalability and performance:
  • 1 Gb and 10 Gb Ethernet ports for bandwidth optimization and performance
  • Non-blocking architecture with wire-speed forwarding of traffic and aggregated throughput of 480 Gbps
  • 100% line-rate performance with 570 nanoseconds switching latency
  • Media access control (MAC) address learning; automatic update and support for up to 16,000 MAC addresses
  • Up to 128 IP interfaces per switch (interfaces 127 and 128 are reserved for switch management)
  • Static and LACP (IEEE 802.3ad) link aggregation, up to 16 trunk groups with up to 12 ports per trunk group
  • Support for jumbo frames (up to 9,216 bytes)
  • Broadcast/multicast storm control
  • IGMP snooping to limit flooding of IP multicast traffic
  • IGMP filtering to control multicast traffic for hosts that are participating in multicast groups
  • Configurable traffic distribution schemes over trunk links that are based on source and destination IP or MAC addresses, or both
  • Fast port forwarding and fast uplink convergence for rapid STP convergence
• Availability and redundancy:
  • Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) for Layer 3 router redundancy
  • IEEE 802.1D STP for providing L2 redundancy
  • IEEE 802.1s Multiple STP (MSTP) for topology optimization, up to 32 STP instances are supported by a single switch
  • IEEE 802.1w Rapid STP (RSTP) provides rapid STP convergence for critical delay-sensitive traffic, such as voice or video
  • Per-VLAN Rapid STP (PVRST) enhancements
  • Layer 2 Trunk Failover to support active/standby configurations of network adapter teaming on compute nodes
  • Hot Links provides basic link redundancy with fast recovery for network topologies that require Spanning Tree to be turned off
• VLAN support:
  • Up to 4095 VLANs supported per switch, with VLAN numbers 1 - 4095 (VLAN 4095 is used by the management network.)
  • Port-based VLANs
  • 802.1Q VLAN tagging support
  • Private VLANs support
• Security:
  • VLAN-based, MAC-based, and IP-based access control lists (ACLs)
  • 802.1x port-based authentication
  • Multiple user IDs and passwords
  • User access control
  • Radius, TACACS+ and LDAP authentication and authorization
  • NIST 800-131A Encryption
  • Selectable encryption protocol
• Quality of Service (QoS):
  • Support for IEEE 802.1p, IP ToS/DSCP, and ACL-based (MAC/IP source and destination addresses and VLANs) traffic classification and processing
  • Traffic shaping and re-marking that is based on defined policies
  • Eight output Class of Service (COS) queues per port for processing qualified traffic
  • IPv4/IPv6 ACL metering
• IP v4 Layer 3 functions:
  • Host management
  • IP forwarding
  • IP filtering with ACLs, up to 127 IPv4 ACLs supported
  • VRRP for router redundancy
  • Support for up to 128 static routes
  • Routing protocol support (RIP v1, RIP v2, OSPF v2, BGP)
  • Support for DHCP Relay
  • Support for IGMP snooping
  • Support for Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) in Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) and Dense Mode (PIM-DM).
• IPv6 Layer 3 functions:
  • IPv6 host management
  • IPv6 forwarding
  • Support for OSPF v3 routing protocol
  • IPv6 filtering with ACLs, up to 128 IPv6 ACLs supported
• Virtualization:
  • Virtual NICs (vNICs) with Ethernet, iSCSI, or FCoE traffic on vNICs
  • Virtual link aggregation groups (vLAGs)
  • VMready support:
    • Up to 2,048 virtual entities (VEs)
    • Automatic VE discovery
    • Up to 1,024 local or distributed VM groups for VEs
    • NMotion® feature for automatic network configuration migration
• Converged Enhanced Ethernet:
  • Priority-Based Flow Control (PFC) (IEEE 802.1Qbb) extends 802.3x standard flow control to allow the switch to pause traffic that is based on the 802.1p priority value in each packet’s VLAN tag.
  • Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) (IEEE 802.1Qaz) provides a method for allocating link bandwidth that is based on the 802.1p priority value in each packet’s VLAN tag.
  • Data Center Bridging Capability Exchange Protocol (DCBX) (IEEE 802.1AB) allows neighboring network devices to exchange information about their capabilities.
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE):
  • FC-BB5 FCoE specification compliant
  • FCoE transit switch operations
  • FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) support for automatic ACL configuration
  • Link Aggregation Group (LAG) support for FCoE traffic
  • Supports 2,048 FCoE sessions with FIP Snooping by using Class ID ACLs
• Manageability:
  • Industry-standard command line interface (isCLI)
  • Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP V1, V2 and V3)
  • HTTP/HTTPS browser GUI
  • Telnet interface for CLI
  • Secure Shell (SSH) v1 and v2 for CLI
  • Secure Copy (SCP) for uploading and downloading the switch configuration via secure channels
  • Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) for discovering network devices
  • Serial interface for CLI
  • Scriptable CLI
  • Dual software images
  • Firmware image update via TFTP, FTP, and Secure FTP (sFTP)
  • Network Time Protocol (NTP) for switch clock synchronization
  • Netconf (XML)
  • Switch Center management application
• Monitoring:
  • Switch LEDs for port status and switch status indication
  • Remote Monitoring (RMON) agent to collect statistics and proactively monitor switch performance
  • Port mirroring for analyzing network traffic passing through switch
  • Change tracking and remote logging with syslog feature
  • Support for sFLOW agent for monitoring traffic in data networks (separate sFLOW analyzer required elsewhere)