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. Features High Performance 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. High Scalability 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 Improved TCO 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. Investment Protection Delivers low latency, power efficiency, and high reliability while providing a highly scalable and flexible platform for advanced fabric services.