Users Guide
support.dell.com Technical Specifications A-1
DELL CONFIDENTIAL - Preliminary 4/11/00
(Rev. 11/3/98) FILE LOCATION: S:\SYSTEMS\Labrador\Ug\89TMRaa0.fm
 
Table A-1 shows the Dell PowerVault 56F 16-Port Fibre Channel switch general 
specifications.
ANSI Fibre Channel protocol. . . . Fibre Channel ANSI standard (FC-PH) 
Fabric initialization . . . . . . . . . . . . complies with FC-SW 3.2
System architecture  . . . . . . . . . . nonblocking shared-memory switch
System processor . . . . . . . . . . . .
superscalar 33-MHz Intel
®
 i960
® 
RP 
microprocessor
Number of Fibre
Channel ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 
Fibre Channel port speed  . . . . . . 1.0625-Gbps full duplex
Modes of operation. . . . . . . . . . . Fibre Channel Class 2 service and Fibre 
Channel Class 3 connectionless service
Aggregate switch I/O
bandwidth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Gbps, full duplex
Frame buffers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 buffers per port at 2112 bytes per frame
Fabric latency  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <2 microseconds with no contention
Data transmission range . . . . . . . up to 500 m (1640 ft) for short-wavelength 
optical link;
up to 10 km (32,808 ft) for long-wavelength 
optical link
Chassis types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . back-to-front airflow (power supply out front)
Fabric management  . . . . . . . . . . Simple Name Server, Alias Server, SNMP, 
Telnet, World Wide Web
NOTE: For the full name of an abbreviation or acronym used in this table, see the "Glossary."










