<div><div>The HP 8/24 SAN switch addresses the needs of SMB organizations as well as large enterprises by functioning as a standalone core switch or as lower-cost edge switch in large core-to-edge tiered storage networks. The 8/24 SAN switches provides unprecedented investment protection. Auto-sensing ports that support backward compatibility with 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec devices significantly reduce deployment complexity and costs, while providing compatibility with installed devices. Organizations that do not require 8 Gbit/sec interfaces can populate the new switches with 4 Gbit/sec SFPs, while preserving their ability to easily upgrade to 8 Gbit/sec SFPs in the future. The 8/24 SAN Switch with 24 enabled ports may be deployed as a full-fabric switch or in Access Gateway mode, which provides connectivity into any SAN (the default mode setting is a switch). Access Gateway mode utilizes NPIV switch standards to present Fibre Channel connections as logical devices to SAN fabrics.<br /></div> <span> <!-- ProductFeautures here --> </span><div class="cPF"><ul><li><strong>High Performance</strong><br />Includes simultaneous wire-speed support for all ports to provide a high-performance system with aggregate bandwidth of up to 384 Gbit/sec full duplex. Provides the highest performance available, with complete backward and forward investment protection. Simplifies SAN management, negating the need to map application performance requirements to port speeds.</li><li><strong>High Scalability</strong><br />Comes with 16 enabled ports and supports "pay-as-you-grow" scalability to 24 enabled ports. Provides seamless server connectivity to multi-vendor fabric environments, and allows a great number of servers to connect to a SAN fabric without increasing switch domain count. Allows up to eight ports (at 2, 4, or 8 Gbit/sec speeds) between a pair of switches to be combined to form a single logical ISL with a speed of up to 64 Gbit/sec (128 Gbit/sec full duplex) for optimal bandwidth utilization and load balancing.</li><li><strong>Improved TCO</strong><br />Optimizes fabric-wide performance and load balancing by automatically routing data to all available paths in the fabric. Remove/avoid performance bottlenecks in high-density virtualized server environments. Advanced fabric services to optimize SAN performance and resource utilization.</li><li><strong>Investment Protection</strong><br />Delivers low latency, power efficiency, and high reliability while providing a highly scalable and flexible platform for advanced fabric services.</li></ul></div> </div>