[citation needed] With the acquisition of Perot Systems, Dell entered the, more profitable, services market[1] and also expanded on the software and system-management-market by acquiring KACE Networks,[2] Quest Software, AppAssure and Credant Technologies.
In 2011, Dell took over high-end network-equipment producer Force10 Networks,[3] which mainly produced multi-layer switches for data center environments, bringing Dell to the market for enterprise and datacenter class network equipment.
But by buying Force10 and later network-security provider SonicWall, the company now had its own intellectual property networking systems and stopped selling most J- and B-series switches, but continued to offer the legacy PowerConnect products made by Broadcom and Marvell with some overlap in the Force10 products.
Below is an overview of the current portfolio of Dell Networking switches, including active models under the PowerConnect name.
4) ports can use either the RJ45/UTP 1000BaseT copper-interface or a fiber SFP transceiver for uplinks to a distribution or core switch.
All switches offer standard features like VLANs, link-aggregation, auto-negotiation for speed- and duplex setting.
Although the switches are mainly layer-2 Ethernet switches they do offer some IP features like static routing (up to 64 static routes), IP or MAC-based access-lists, DHCP snooping, quality of service options and IGMP (multicast) features.
The switch also offers special features for a voice-VLAN as well as extensive options for dot1x security and dynamic VLAN assignment via RADIUS or TACACS+ server.
For better energy efficiency the switch also offers Energy Efficient Ethernet or EEE (IEEE 802.3az) allowing the switch to negotiate a lower link-speed on access-interfaces when the connected client doesn't require the full bandwidth, and when the connected client requires more bandwidth than the active link speed it will (re)negotiate a higher speed.
The default setting is rapid-spanning tree.Other features offered by the PCT5500 series is port-mirroring, jumbo-frame support, dynamic ARP inspection, IGMP snooping, private VLAN configuration, LLDP/LLDP-MED, management-access-lists, etc.
The two PoE enabled switches can offer up to 15.4 watts of power to each of the 24 or 48 copper gigabit interfaces.
On the back-side of each model, there are two extension-module bays that can be used for stacking or for 10 Gbit uplinks offering two SFP+ transceiver ports.
Similar to the rack-switches PCT7000 and PCT8024 series the switch offers an out-of-band Fast-Ethernet port for management as well as a serial console connection, required for initial configuration.
The underlying operating system of the PCT8100 is based on Linux 2.6 where all other 'Broadcom powered' PowerConnects run on VxWorks.
The Dell Networking H-series is an OEM version of Intels' Omni-Path platform, which itself is an alternative for InfiniBand.
[20] The N-series switches come in 3 groups: The N1500 offers a low budget step in the model compared to the N2000.
The N3000 is hardware-wise pretty similar to the N2000 series but the OS offers advanced IP capabilities (including routing protocols like RIP, OSPF, PBR, etc.).
[25] The main difference between the S4810 or S4820T series switches is that the S5000 is modular: it can start with fewer ports, and the second big change is that it will be able to have native 8 Gb fibre channel ports modules, allowing to connect directly to a native fiber-channel switch (e.g.
It fully supports Data Center Bridging (DCB) and can also be used as FCoE or Fibre Channel switch by using a FC interface module.
It provides full FC logic allowing one to directly connect FC based SAN's to the switch to fully support FCoE or Converged Networking in combination with the other 10G switches in the Dell Networking range.
It is possible to buy the Z9500 with only a number of the interfaces actually enabled and via additional licenses to be bought at a later moment in time datacenter owners can spread the investment with the growth of the traffic-demand.
Both switches are designed to be the 'spine' in a spine-leaf distributed core network-design and with the VLT technology fully redundant topologies can be built where two switches (partially) share the data pane but have independent management (unlike stacking where there is only a single management pane).
The C-series are rebranded to the Dell model-number naming: one letter followed by 4 digits (instead of the legacy Force10 C150 and C300 chassis) while the E-series has not seen any name-change.