Small sites with limited racks? Half-width switches have your back

[NetworkExperts]

This blog written by Steve Smith, Sr Product Manager Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Steve specializes in driving DC switching products and solutions to meet customer business values. 

 Organizations nowadays often operate across distributed locations. This requires them to deploy fit for purpose, compute (HCI), storage (SDS), and right-sized (scale) networking to power and connect with multiple locations. However, many of these locations have limited space and power and often share rack space across multiple functions like IT, video, security, etc. 

To alleviate these issues, the new HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325H high performance half-width switches were designed for both traditional smaller-scale data center campus connectivity and for smaller edge or colocation sites/racks that require limited port density and/or have limited rack space. This is the newest addition to our CX switch portfolio, which delivers simple, efficient, high-performance solutions that are purpose-built with smart actionable insights for a positive impact on business and revenue.  

Concerned about performance? 

Offering high bandwidth and high performance with ultra-low latency of under 300 ns port-to-port, the HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325H switch leverages the same high-performance ASIC and fully featured operating system that the full-width CX 8325 provides and supports cut-through or store and forward switching (with no need to reboot). 

Concerned about rack space or unused ports? 

Ideal for smaller edge or colocation data centers that require limited port density or have limited rack space, these half-width switches can be deployed redundantly, side-by-side in a one (1RU) server rack unit. They are perfect for small campus and branch locations where space is at a premium (e.g., retail locations, healthcare facilities, media, financial, and enterprise branches) and which don’t always have IT racks, but often have storage closets being used to store servers and IT equipment. 

Concerned about costs? 

By conserving rack space and costs when deploying server, storage, and HCI solutions with fixed redundancy on power and cooling, the CX 8325H switch helps organizations balance density, high availability, and affordability, using a half-width, single RU form factor. They are designed to use less electric power than competing switches, and with less than 95W, producing less heat and allowing reduced OPEX cost.  

Concerned about flexibility/scalability? 

Easy to scale to multiple racks with increasing workloads, the CX 8325H is the ideal form factor to start with for full redundancy 1RU. The AOS-CX operating system provides a modern, database-driven OS that automates and simplifies critical and complex network tasks. Simplified and unified management with AOS-CX provides stability with an advanced Layer 2/3 feature set including BGP, OSPF, VRF-Lite, IPv6, dynamic VXLAN and intelligent monitoring, visibility, and remediation with NAE.  

HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325H switches deliver high-performance 1/10/25/40/100G connectivity for a wide variety of compute and storage networking use cases (both lossy and lossless).  These half-width switches can be deployed redundantly, side-by-side in a one (1RU) server rack unit.  This half-width solution helps organizations balance density, high availability, and affordability which helps to save space and costs on server, storage and HCI connectivity.  

Key Features: 

• High-performance, high density 1/10/25/40/100G connectivity with fixed, redundant power (1+1) and fans (3+1)  

• The CX 8325H switch enables low-latency and “lossless” network QoS and connectivity characteristics that storage requires 

• CX 8325H-18Y4C is designed to support any combination of 1/10/25G interfaces on its 18 ports – no port grouping necessary. The 4 ports of 100G can be split using breakout cabling depending on your needs. 

• CX 8325H-16C allows for different ports speeds with breakout cabling, allowing for a single 100G to be split into 4x25G. 

• Two additional 1/10G Telemetry ports to support additional connectivity   

For more information 

• HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325H At-a-glance