Dell EMC Networking Z9100-ON Z-Series Switch Review

The @DellEMC Networking #Z9100-ON Z-Series switch is a 1U fixed, 10/25/40/50/100GbE network switch built for the highest performance in mind. To move this beyond a marketing term, the Z9100-ON powered SCinet, which is commonly referred to as the “World’s Fastest Network.” The Dell EMC Z9100-ON Z-Series switch, along with the Dell EMC Networking S4048 S-Series 10GbE Switch, are both part of the latest additions making up the networking refresh of the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab. And again, our review here both looks at the Z9100-ON Z-Series switch, while at the same time gives the reader a look into why and how we are integrating the switch into our lab.  Like a wide variety of Dell EMC gear, the Z9100-ON switch offers some customization that allows for greater flexibility. The switch has 128 ports on it and can be configured to have either 32 ports of 100GbE, 64 ports of 50GbE, 32 ports of 40GbE, 128 ports of 25GbE or 128 ports of 10GbE and two SFP+ ports of 10GbE/1GbE/100MbE. This can help consolidate rack space and/or aid in migration as a data center begins to move to 100Gbps. The switch also offers organizations a cost-effective method for transitioning to a software-defined data center. With performance, the Z9100-ON switch leverages non-blocking switching architecture and delivers L2 and L3 forwarding capacity, along with QoS and a full complement of standards-based IPv4 and IPv6 features. The switch also incorporates multiple architectural features that are stated to optimize data center network flexibility, efficiency and availability. The switch can deliver up to 6.4Tbps of switching I/O bandwidth (full duplex). The L2 multipath support is through Virtual Link Trunking (VLT). For this level of performance and ports, the use cases are still emerging. However, organizations in the process of Active Fabric implementation or small-scale Active Fabric implementation can benefit from the Z9100-ON switch as either a leaf or spine switch. The switch is also a great fit for use with high-performance SDN/OpenFlow 1.3.1 enabled with the ability to inter-operate with industry-standard OpenFlow controllers. And the Z9100-ON can be used as a high-speed VXLAN Layer 2 Gateway that connects the hypervisor-based overlay networks with non-virtualized infrastructure.

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