Editors's Note: This blog was co-authored with Robert Hartman, Dell Networking Product Consultant
2013 has been an exceptional year for Dell’s networking product portfolio, not only having emerged as a challenger in the Gartner Campus Magic Quadrant for networking but stacking up a record number of key awards across several important product areas.
Most recently, ITPro recently awarded the Dell Networking S4820T the ITPro Innovation Award, and 5 out of 5 stars in its review. The S4820T has helped hundreds of customers easily accelerate their GbE top-of-rack (ToR) infrastructure to 10GBase-T, while delivering cost-effective copper connectivity to servers and storage arrays, and reducing the need for fiber into rack and blade deployments. ITPro found the S4820T delivers the flexibility and feature capability which data centers require in a ToR, while also praising the switch’s forward-looking support for SDN and OpenFlow. Furthermore, the integration with Active Fabric Manager was highlighted as well as the included Layer 3 routing, which other vendors can choose to charge for. The S4820T delivers efficient and cost-effective ToR connectivity for data center deployments.
Earlier this year the S5000 won two important Interop awards, including Best of Interop Las Vegas 2013 Finalist and Best of Show at the Japan 2013 Interop. Yesterday, CRN awarded the S5000 the Tech Innovator Award in the Networking Enterprise category. The award recognizes innovation in technology as well as products that help support channel excellence. The S5000 was announced earlier this year, and was recognized in CRNs review as part of a series of launches that day that CRN cited were “the most significant networking launches Dell has staged since its August 2011 acquisition of data center networking specialist Force 10.” The S5000 is Dell’s first fully modular 1RU ToR LAN/SAN unified fabric switch. It allows customers a “pay-as-they-grow” option simplifying when migrating from 1 to 10GbE and 2, 4, 8Gbps FC to FCoE. It also offers the highest port density in the industry for competitive FCoE switches (up to 1.3X the Cisco Nexus 5548 and up to 2.6X Brocade VDX 6730).
Another notable mention was the newest 10/40GbE ToR switch, the Dell S6000, achieved a coveted Miercom Performance Verified certification. The S6000 introduced in August has raised the bar for 10 and 40G density in a 1RU form factor, while delivering performance and accelerating workloads across physical data centers and virtual infrastructures. Miercom tested the S6000 in a spine-leaf architecture and found that the “switch exhibited robust performance, energy efficiency and strong scalability in a VDI environment.” With ample performance and seamless scalability, the S6000 delivers feature-rich innovation, purpose-built for virtual and physical infrastructures.
Along with Dell Networking recently listed as a Challenger in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2013, it’s been an exciting year not only for great networking products and awards but also for industry and customer feedback to re-emphasize Dell as delivering powerful solutions to meet customer needs. Looking ahead at the new networking products to come – we have high hopes for 2014!