- (2) S5248F-ON switches for the front-end (these switches are referred to as ‘Rabbit’ and ‘Hare’ within Dell documentation)
- (2) S5248F-ON switches for the back-end (these switches are referred to as ‘Fox’ and ‘Hound’ within Dell documentation)
These pairs of switches are integrated within every ECS EX500 rack and include cabling to each of the EX500 nodes. All ECS nodes are attached to both the front-end and back-end networks via a 25GbE connection to each switch, as noted in the following table.
Each pair of front-end switches located within the ECS EX500 rack is required to be connected to the customer network, as in the following network connectivity diagram.
As detailed in the Object Storage Networking component description in Configuration Overview, the front-end network handles “east/west” data traffic within ECS itself (between nodes), as well as “north/south” data traffic from ECS to the client system (such as a VantageCore VMware on-premises platform). It should therefore be understood that the speed of the customer network (shown in blue in the network connectivity diagram) is critical towards ensuring ECS is operating its full capability.