Dell Networking

In 2011, Dell took over high-end network-equipment producer Force10 Networks[3] that mainly produces multi-layer switches for data center environments and with that step Dell entered the market for (enterprise and datacenter class) network equipment. Until then Dell didn't have their own network equipment: the switches that were sold under the brand PowerConnect were products designed and built -for Dell- by 3rd parties such as Broadcom and Marvell Technology Group. And Dell also offered existing products from other suppliers with a 'PowerConnect' sticker on it like the B-series for Brocade (Ethernet) switches or J-series for Juniper switches. But by buying Force10 and later network-security provider SonicWall the company now has 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.

In 2013 Dell has started the process to fully integrate these two product lines and rebrand the entire portfolio into Dell Networking, all running on Dell Networking Operating System (instead of FTOS and Powerconnect firmware). All new networking products will be marketed under the new name Dell Networking with a standardized naming-convention: Dell Networking ⟨series-letter⟩-⟨4 digit number⟩. Most existing PowerConnect products will keep their existing names until they will go 'end of sales' (EOS) when they are replaced by new Dell Networking products or will be rebranded to the new naming convention.

The Dell Networking PCT2800 web-managed switches are entry-level Ethernet switches that only offer a web-based GUI management interface. There are 4 models offering between 8 and 48 ports per switch. The interfaces on the switches are all copper-based gigabit Ethernet-ports and the 24 and 48 ports switches offer 2 or 4 'combo' ports where the last 2 (resp. 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. The MAC address-table can hold up to 8000 MAC addresses in its forwarding table and have a 2Mb packet-buffering capacity[9]

The PowerConnect 3500 series switches are Ethernet access-switches which comes in 4 models: the PCT3524 and PCT3548 with 24 resp 48 10/100Mb ethernet ports and the PCT3524P / PCT3548P with 24 or 48 10/100Mb with PoE option to power VOIP phones, Wifi Access-points or IP camera's.[10] All models can be provided with a redundant power supply for either pure redundant power or to provide a full PoE power budget for the 48 ports PoE switch. The technical specifications of the 'non-PoE' and the 'PoE' models are the same in regards to switching capabilities and the main difference between the 24 and 48 port models is the total forwarding rate of the switch: 12,8Gbit/s for both 24 port models and 17,6 Gbit/s for the 48 port models. As with the PCT2800 models the MAC address table can hold up to 8000 MAC addresses.
Apart from all standard layer2 switching capabilities as VLAN's, link aggregation (static and LACP, dot1x access-security and dynamic VLAN assignment, the switches also offer some basic IP routing/layer 3 processing.
All PCT3500 switches offer two-gigabit ethernet (1000BaseT) ports for high-speed uplinks to distribution or core switches or for stacking of switches and two gigabits SFP ports for a 1Gbit/s fiber transceiver for uplinks to distribution/core layer.[11]

The PowerConnect 5500 series switches are gigabit ethernet access-switches, available in 4 models: either a 24 or 48 port gigabit ethernet switch or a 24/48 port gigabit ethernet switch with power-over-ethernet option. Regardless of the model, the switches offer two HDMI ports for stacking and two SFP+ 10Gbit transceiver ports for 10Gb uplinks.[12]
The technical specifications of the 4 models are all the same, except for the number of ports and the PoE feature and the total switching capacity of 128 Gbit/s (24 port) or 176 Gbit/s (48 port)[13] with a MAC address table size of 16.000 entries, up to 4000 VLAN's, support for link-aggregation, VLAN tagging, dot1x security, and dynamic VLAN assignment, etc.
Although the switches are mainly layer2 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. Up to 8 switches out of the 5500 series can be stacked, using the built-in HDMI stack-ports, to form one logical switch. 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 PCT5500 series support Spanning-tree, Rapid Spanning-tree, and Multiple spanning-tree. 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. To provide (full) power to more than 24 ports, an extra 'redundant power supply' must be installed on the PCT5548P. In case of the failure of one of the power supplies, PoE priorities can be set to continue to give PoE power to the most important devices and switch off less important devices.[14]

Dell Networking offers two main-models for layer3 gigabit ethernet rack switches: the PowerConnect 6200 series and the PowerConnect 7000 series. In regards to available models for the number of ports, PoE support, and copper/fiber the PCT6200 and PCT7000 models are very similar. The basic features of both models are also very alike, but the PCT7000 series offer a range of additional features that are not available in the PCT6200. Some important differences between the PCT6200 and PCT7000 are that the PCT7000 offers a dedicated 'out-of-band' management interface. Although both switches are stackable, only PCT6200 models or PCT7000 models can be combined in a single stack. The only exception is that it is possible to combine the PCT7000 series with the blade-switch PCM6348 in a single stack. It is not possible to combine a PCT6200 rack switch with a PCM6220 blade-switch.

The PCT6200 series is the first real 'multilayer switch' and the PCT7000 is a more advanced and powerful multi-layer switch. But for both models the following characteristics apply: besides the basic IP features offered by the PCT5500 the PCT6200 series (and above) are real multi-layer switches offering dynamic routing features like RIP and OSPF. The PCT6200/PCT7000 series offer either 24 or 48 port switches with a PoE enabled variant on both the 24 and 48 port.[15][16] And there are also switches offering 24 SFP interfaces for an all-fiber network and/or to let the "-F series" switch be used as a distribution or core level with uplinks to remote access-switches via a fiber-optic link. Each of the models offers 24+4 or 48+4 ports on the front-side of the switch where the last (highest) 4 ports are so-called 'combo ports': for the 'copper' based switches (1000BaseT or PoE models) there is an option to connect up to four fiber links using an SFP transceiver instead of the corresponding RJ45 copper interfaces. And on the PCTxx24F up to four RJ45 UTP ports (without PoE) can be used.
On the back-side of each model, there are two extension-module bays that can be used for stacking or for 10Gbit uplinks offering two SFP+ transceiver ports. When stacking the PowerConnect series switches, the stacking module must be installed in bay1.

Some of the most obvious differences between the PCT6200 models and the PCT7000 models are:

The PCT7000 also offers a dual 10GbaseT copper 10Gbit uplink module where the 6200 series only offers an SFP+ uplink module

The PCT6200 stacking module can also be configured to run as a 10Gbit Ethernet module with CX4 interfaces

On the PCT7000 series, a stack can be combined with the PCM6348 blade switch in a Dell M1000e chassis

The PCT7000 series offer an 'out of band' management interface which keeps management traffic out of the main switching/routing part of the switches.

The PCT7048R and PCT7048RA is a switch with redundant power-supply (without need for external RPS module) and the RA offers reverse-air flow (back to ports direction, compared to ports to 'power supply side' in normal airflow). The PCT6200 series has only standard airflow; for a redundant power supply, a separate (1 RU) RPS module is required.

The PCT7000 series offers a wider range of supported SFP+ optics, including some long-range multi-mode 10Gb optics

The latest addition on the PowerConnect portfolio is the Powerconnect 8132(f) and 8164(f) offering up to 32 or 64 10GbaseT or SFP+ ports. The 8164(f) also offers built-in two QSFP+ 40Gb ports. All the PCT8100 models have one expansion slot allowing to insert a dual QSFP+ port for two 40Gb interfaces or -with a break-out cable- 2 x 4 x SFP+ 10Gbit/s ports[17] Once the PCT8100 us updated to firmware level 6.0 or later, it is renamed to N4000 model.

The PowerConnect 8100 series switches announced in 2012 offered 24 or 48 ports on 10Gb and 0 or 2 built-in ports for 40 Gb QSFP ports.[18] All models also have one extension-module slot with either two QSFP 40Gb ports, 4 SFP+ 10Gb ports or 4 10GbaseT ports. It is a small (1U) switch with a high port-density and can be used as distribution or (collapsed)core switch for campus networks and for use in the datacenter it offers features such as loss-less ethernet for iSCSI and FCoE, data center bridging (DCB) and iSCSI Auto-configure[19] The PCT8100 series is a "multi-layer" switch which can be used as either a "pure" layer-2 ethernet-switch or as a "layer-3" switch with extensive IP routing functions. Most routing is done in hardware and can be done at (near) wire-speed. Management can be done via the "out-of-band" ethernet interface or "in-band" by connecting to one of the vlan-ip addresses. Management is possible via HTTP(s), telnet, SSH or even serial console cable.

Up to 6 units in the 8100 series can be stacked to form one logical switch and any type of interface (10Gb or 40Gb, fiber-optical, or UTP copper) can be used for stacking. 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.[19] The switch is built around the Broadcom Trident+ ASIC: the same ASIC as can be found in Cisco Nexus 5000 switches or Force10 models. The PowerConnect 8100 is initially released with firmware 5.0 of the switch-firmware which offers the same features as the PowerConnect 7000 and 8024 rack-switches and the different M-series Ethernet switches. The underlying operating system of the PCT8100 is based on Linux 2.6 where all other 'Broadcom powered' PowerConnects run on VxWorks.

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The N1500 offers a low budget step in the model compared to the N2000. The N1500 doesn't have dedicated (back-side) stacking-ports, but 10G ethernet uplink ports can be converted to stacking ports, and multiple N1500s can be stacked together.

The N2000 is an Ethernet switch with limited IP capabilities. There are two 'sizes': 24 x 1GbaseT or 48 x 1GBaseT ports and each of them available as POE+ or standard switch. All models in the N20xx series can be stacked with other models in the same series. Although they do use the same stacking-cables as the N3000 series it is NOT possible to stack N2000 with N3000 switches. All models come with 2 x 10Gbase SFP+ uplink ports and two 'tweeting' stacking ports at the back. Management can be done by assigning an IP address to switch or one of the VLAN-interfaces.[21] The N2000 is marketed as the follow-up for the legacy PowerConnect 5500 models as well as the Force10 S25 and S50 models.

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.). Besides the 4 model choices as in N2000 (24 or 48 ports, with or without POE+) there is also the N3024F which offers 24 x SFP 1G ports.
Unlike the N2000 series, the N3000 has 'combo-ports': All 'copper' based switches offer 2 SFP 1Gb fiber ports (to be used instead of the two highest-numbered RJ45 1GBaseT port) and the N3024F offers two 1 GbaseT RJ45 combo ports (interface 23 and 24). All N3000 series switches also offer two SFP+ 10Gb uplink ports. Optionally, a module can be added for another two SFP+ ports or two 10GBaseT RJ45 ports. Stacking can be done via the built-in 'twenty gig' ports and for management, an out-of-band 1G Ethernet management port can be used.[22] The N3000 series is the follow-up for the legacy PowerConnect 6200 and 7000 series as well as the Force10 S50/S55 switches.

The N4000 series is the new name for the former PowerConnect 8100 series switch and any PCT8100 that is upgraded to a firmware above 6.0.0.0 will be renamed to an N40xx series switch. There are four main models: N4032F and N4064F with standard 24 or 48 x 10G SFP+ ports, 0 or 2 built-in QSFP+ ports and one module bay; and N4032 and N4064 with 24 or 48 x 10GbaseT RJ45 ports, 0 or 2 built-in QSFP+ ports, and one module bay. Each QSFP+ port can be split in a 4 x SFP+ port using a break-out cable. The module bay can accommodate either a two-port QSFP+, a 4 x 10GBaseT or a 4 x SFP+ module.
Stacking can be done via 10G or 40G ports, and the different N40xx series switches can 'mix and match' in a single stack. Management can be done 'in-band' or via the dedicated out-of-band 1Gb Ethernet interface.[23] See also above section on the PowerConnect 8100 series for model-details.