M8428 k switch biography

Updated 1/27/2011
Dell quietly announced the addition of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switch module, known as the M8428-k.  This blade module advertises 600 ns low-latency, wire-speed,  10GbE performance, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switching, and low-latency 8 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) switching and connectivity.
In this era of virtualization in the datacenter, CPU and RAM capabilities on servers are no longer the bottleneck, but instead it is the servers’ I/O.  Technology vendors are now offering 10Gb Ethernet options which helps to reduce the traditional Ethernet I/O bottleneck.

M8428 k switch biography

In fact, many vendors have begun to offer a convergence of networking allowing both Ethernet and Storage commands to travel down a single converged pipe. These devices, known as converged network switches have been around since Cisco first introduced their Nexus product a couple of years ago.

The design of the original converged switch took a single 10Gb cable to a Top of Rack (ToR) sw