FS NC8200 and NC8400 Series Chassis Switch Overview

Nowadays, data center network infrastructure needs to be both agile and powerful, which puts greater demands on today's network switches: more capacity, higher speed and more cost-effective. FS data center chassis switches — NC8200 and NC8400 series, are designed to address these necessary demands. They will deliver more of what our customers need — ports and performance while consuming less of what’s finite — costs, space, and power.

FS Chassis Switches Models in Data Center 

FS NC8200 and NC8400 series chassis switches come with a compact design of 4 slots for the deployment of 1 to 4 line cards. To meet the rapid and ongoing traffic growth in data centers, they support up to 128x 40/100G high-density full line-rate ports, and deliver up to 25.6Tbps switching capacity and 19.05Bpps forwarding rate. Here are their detailed specifications.

What FS Data Center Chassis Switches Bring?

Scaling Data Center Performance

The FS NC8200 and NC8400 series chassis switches deliver non-blocking switching capacity that enables faster networks for data centers. The NC8400 series can even support a maximum of 128x 40/100G or 64x 100G, 16x 400G high-density full line-rate ports and deliver up to 25.6Tbps switching capacity, which meets the demands of bandwidth-intensive applications. For NC8200 series, a variety of FSOS-supported features enable flexible selections at all tiers of the network and deployment scenarios including layer 2 MLAG, switch stacking, layer 3 ECMP, and VXLAN overlay.

Both NC8200 and NC8400 series chassis switches support MLAG (multi-chassis aggregation group). It helps eliminate network loops in traditional Layer 2 networks and dramatically improves network stability and bandwidth utilization. Besides, the NC8200 series adopts industrial-leading stacking technology to realize unified network management and improve network reliability.

Enhanced Features for High-Performance Networks

The FS NC8200 and NC8400 series switches offer a rich series of advanced features to improve the agility of modern data centers, including layer 2 and layer 3 network features. Customers can choose the one that best suits their deployment needs and adapt easily to changing requirements.

MLAG: MLAG achieves device-level link backup and network-level resiliency, ensuring uninterrupted services for applications such as bank and financial trading. FS NC8200 and NC8400 series switches running MLAG can be upgraded without disrupting MLAG traffic. During the upgrade, another switch in the system takes over traffic forwarding to ensure uninterrupted services.

EVPN-VXLAN: (Ethernet VPN) EVPN-VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) offers a universal framework that can help enterprises to manage their campus and data center networks. It decouples the underlay network (physical topology) from the overlay network (virtual topology), which allows users to build Layer 2/Layer 3 connectivity between endpoints across campus and data centers while maintaining a consistent underlay architecture, greatly improving network flexibility.

RoCE: RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet ) is an innovative technology that provides many advantages of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). It offers the ability to write to compute or storage elements using the RDMA over an Ethernet network instead of using host CPUs, which can improve the CPU utilization and lower latency. FS NC8200 series data center switches support the RoCE that can help users get a converged network where all services run over the Ethernet infrastructure. Moreover, RoCE ensures microsecond latency and zero packet loss, which is necessary for modern data center applications.

Maximum Network Design Flexibility

Compared with fixed-port Ethernet data center switches, the NC8200 series data center switches offer a wide choice of dense 25G/40G/100G line cards in 2U compact chassis. The resilient 10G to 100G data rate combinations help administrators build suitable scale networks and bring more flexibility to spine-and-leaf infrastructure design in the data center. The NC8400 series data center switches come with 4 slots in a 4U chassis. They can be used with 32-port 100Gb QSFP28 line cards and 16-port 100Gb QSFP28 line cards with 4x400Gb QSFP-DD that can operate at 40/100/400Gbps speed to achieve massive network capacity, empowering your data centers, AI applications and large enterprise networks.

Simplified Management

FS NC8200 and NC8400 series chassis switches support Command Line Interface (CLI), Telnet, and cluster management, which helps simplify device management and provide various encryption modes such as SSH2.0 and SSL to enhance network security. With various types of management methods, users can manage endpoints for streamlined operations to improve work efficiency. Moreover, they also support SNMP v1/v2c/v3 as well as a universal network management platform and service management software such as BMC.

High Availability and Reliability

With multiple redundant power suppliers and smart fans, FS NC8200 and NC8400 series chassis switches ensure that no power outage will damage the equipment or disrupt the network. The NC8200 series switches come with dual redundant power supplies and 2+1 hot-swappable smart fans, while the NC8400 series switches take things to the next level with 2+2 redundant power supplies and 5+1 hot-swappable fans. All PSUs can be removed or replaced without shutting down the system, and variable-speed fans help you achieve superior cooling, noise and power consumption reduction.

Data Center Deployments

With high-density 25GbE, 40GbE, and 100GbE available and abundant layer 2/layer 3 features, the NC8200 series data center switches are designed to deliver high-performance and stable connections for medium data centers. Likewise, the NC8400 series data center switches support a maximum of 128x 40G/100G or 16x 100G, 4x 400G high-density full line rate ports, making it optimal for spine deployments in large data centers, HPC, service provider, and cloud provider networks. The following topology is the typical spine-and-leaf application of the NC8400 series switches.