Running out of rack space? Half-width switches can help.

Today, businesses are often distributed across multiple locations.
You need to build servers and storage that are fit for purpose, and a network of appropriate size, and supply power and connectivity from multiple locations.

However, many are space and power limited, and rack space is often shared across multiple departments, such as IT, video, and security.

To alleviate these problems, new HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325H High-performance half-width switches are designed for both small data center campus connectivity and small edge or colocation sites/racks where limited port density is required or rack space is limited.

Performance aspects

The HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325H Switch delivers high performance with ultra-low latency of less than 300ns between ports.
It features the same high-performance ASIC and AOS-CX operating system as the existing full-width CX 8325 switch.

Efficient use of rack space and number of ports

Ideal for small edge or colocation data centers with limited port density or limited rack space, the CX8325H can be deployed with two switches side-by-side in a single server rack unit (1RU).

It may be suitable for small campuses and branch offices that are at a premium on space or use storage cabinets to store servers and IT equipment, such as retail stores, healthcare facilities, media, finance, and enterprise branches.

Cost aspect

Save rack space and costs when deploying server, storage, and HCI solutions with fixed redundancy for power and cooling, the CX 8325H switch uses a half-width, single-RU form factor to help organizations balance density, high availability, and economics.

Designed to consume less power than competing switches, at less than 95W, it generates less heat and reduces OPEX costs.

Flexibility/scalability aspect

Easily expandable across multiple racks as your workload grows, the CX 8325H is the ideal form factor for fully redundant 1RU.

The AOS-CX operating system provides a modern, database-driven OS that automates and streamlines critical and complex network tasks.
Simplified and unified management through AOS-CX provides reliability through an advanced Layer 2/3 feature set including BGP, OSPF, VRF-Lite, IPv6, dynamic VXLAN, and intelligent monitoring, visibility, and remediation via NAE.

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The CX8325H switch provides high-performance 1/10/25/40/100G connectivity for a variety of compute and storage networking use cases (both lossless and lossless). This helps organizations save space and costs for system connectivity while maintaining a balance of port density, high availability, and cost-effectiveness.

In particular, it provides sufficient performance as a replacement for HPE's existing SN2010 and SN2100 switches, which will be discontinued in 2025.

function	CX 8325H	M-Series SN2010/SN2100	CX 8325
ACL Policy (Entries)	4,000	5,120	4,000
MAC address	Spine/Core: 32,768 Leaf/Agg: 98,304	88K	Spine/Core: 32,768 Leaf/Agg: 98,304
IPv4 Neighbors	Spine/Core: 28,000 Leaf/Agg: 120,000	8,000	Spine/Core: 28,000 Leaf/Agg: 120,000
IPv4 Routes	Spine/Core: 131,064 Leaf/Agg: 28,672	10,936	Spine/Core: 131,064 Leaf/Agg: 28,672
Multicast Routes	8,192	2,047	8,192