Dell S4100-ON

Five 1 RU switches stacked together for the photo. These are independent switches

Introduced May 2017

Actually a family of four (or five) switches with either 28 or 48 access ports and either SFP+ or Tw-pair. There is a fifth varient that includes fiber channel and 48 SFP+ access ports. Cumulusnetworks says in their hardware compatibility matrix that this is a Broadcom Maverick.

These switches are the topic of an Oct 2017 Tolly report at http://tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=217126 that contains some useful information. Quoting the relevant parts:

    Port Buffering

    The Dell EMC switches use a common packet buffer that is shared across all ports of a given switch on a dynamic basis. These buffers can be used to prevent packet loss by buffering packets where an output port is momentarily oversubscribed. Tolly engineers determined that the port buffer capacity of each of the switches was eight MB.

    and at the end of the report

    Port Buffering

    To saturate the switch port buffers, engineers configured Ixia to provide one line-rate traffic stream destined for a single port. Engineers created a separatge traffic burst destined to this fully-loaded port, and verified that after traffic was stopped, that all packets were received.

Maverick has 12 MB of packet memory and 8 MB is available to absorb a single microburst. That tells us that Maverick is a single core design. Contrast with Tomahawk's four core design.

12 port family members

In January 2019 Dell added two S4112 12-port switches to the product line. The family data sheet has been revised to cover the new entries.