Dell PowerSwitch SN2201 1GbE Switch

The Dell PowerSwitch SN2201 is a 1U switch with 48 RJ45 1GBASE-T host ports and four 100GbE QSFP28 uplinks, built on the NVIDIA Spectrum ASIC, with 448 Gbps of switching capacity, a 667 Mpps packet rate and a 16MB fully shared packet buffer.

Dell files it under AI switches, and its role there is specific: it is the out-of-band management switch for a GPU pod. Every accelerated rack needs one, it is the least expensive thing in that rack, and it is the switch most likely to be forgotten until the pod is being cabled.

Why a 1GbE switch appears in an 800GbE conversation

An AI fabric has at least two networks and usually three. There is the compute fabric, which carries the training traffic and is built from 400 or 800Gb/s hardware. There is often a separate storage fabric. And there is the management and out-of-band network, which carries BMC traffic, PXE boot, console access, telemetry collection and the fabric manager's own control plane.

That third network is where the SN2201 lives. Dell's own positioning is that it is "ideal as an out-of-band (OOB) management switch or as a ToR switch connecting up to 48 1G Base-T host ports with non-blocking 100GbE spine uplinks". Forty-eight copper ports is one rack of servers' worth of BMCs with room left over for PDUs and console servers.

The reason it is worth specifying carefully rather than grabbing whatever 48-port switch is to hand is the uplink tier. Four 100GbE QSFP28 ports on a management switch is unusual, and it means the management network does not become a bottleneck when a hundred nodes stream telemetry during a training run, or when a fleet-wide firmware push saturates the out-of-band path. It also means the management switch can plug straight into a 100GbE aggregation layer instead of needing an intermediate hop.

The port map, and what the uplinks actually do

The 48 access ports are RJ45 copper running 10, 100 or 1000BASE-T. The four QSFP28 cages are where the flexibility sits: each supports 100GbE natively and breaks out downward, so the same chassis can present up to 8 ports of 50GbE, 4 of 40GbE, or 16 each of 25GbE, 10GbE and 1GbE depending on how the cages are configured.

Practically, the breakout matters more than the native 100GbE. Uplinking a management switch into a 25GbE leaf via a 100G-to-4x25G breakout cable is the common case, and it is the reason the breakout cable is the first thing to specify alongside the switch. Dell also allows a variety of blocking ratios on the uplinks so the oversubscription can be tuned to the workload rather than fixed by the hardware.

Spectrum silicon, and the software you can run on it

The ASIC is first-generation NVIDIA Spectrum. Its architectural argument is the packet buffer: 16MB, monolithic, and fully shared across every port rather than carved into per-port slices. On a management network that matters less than it does on a compute fabric, but it is the same design principle that makes the larger Spectrum switches behave predictably under incast, and it is why this switch can absorb a synchronised telemetry burst from a full rack without dropping.

Beyond forwarding, the silicon carries the telemetry stack that the rest of the Spectrum range shares. What Just Happened (WJH) reports event-triggered detail on why a packet was dropped rather than leaving an operator to infer it from counters. Hardware-accelerated histograms track queue depths at sub-microsecond granularity. The hardware is Inband Network Telemetry-ready, and streaming telemetry feeds NVIDIA NetQ.

On software, the switch is open. It ships as an ONIE bare-metal platform, so the network operating system is a purchasing decision rather than a fixed attribute: NVIDIA Cumulus Linux and Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies are the two supported paths, and ONIE will install alternatives. It also runs Docker containers directly on the switch, with per-container memory and CPU limits and resource monitoring - useful when the management switch is the only always-on device in a lab or edge rack and something has to host a collector or a jump service.

Confirm the intended network operating system before purchase. On a secondary-market unit the installed image tells you nothing about what you are licensed to run.

Physical planning

The chassis is 1.72 in high, 16.84 in wide and 17.00 in deep, weighing 16.3 lbs, and it mounts in a 4-post 19-inch rack on a tool-less rail kit. At 17 inches deep it fits in shallow racks and wall cabinets that a full-depth data centre switch will not.

Power is two hot-swappable supplies in 1+1 redundancy, colour-coded along with the four N+1 fans so an on-site hand can tell airflow direction without a manual. Typical draw is 100W (ATIS). Airflow is selectable forward or reverse, and on a management switch that is chosen to match the servers around it rather than the fabric - if the compute nodes exhaust to the hot aisle, so should this.

The operating envelope is 0 to 40 C at 10-85% relative humidity non-condensing, to 3,050 m. That 40 C ceiling is wider than the SN4700's and the SN5400's, which is convenient given that management switches often end up in the least well-cooled part of the rack.

Where it sits in the range

The SN2201 has no direct sibling - it is the only 1GbE model in the Dell AI switch lineup, and everything else in that grouping is a fabric switch. The compute-side pairings are the SN4700 at 32 x 400GbE, the SN5400 at 64 x 400GbE, and the SN5610 and SN5600D at 64 x 800GbE. If the fabric side is InfiniBand rather than Ethernet, the SN2201 is still the management switch - the out-of-band network is Ethernet either way, which is a large part of why this model outsells the fabric switches it sits beside. See the Dell AI fabric switch guide for how the Ethernet and InfiniBand paths compare. The switches this one manages are listed together on our AI fabric switch range.

Every unit is professionally reconditioned, fully tested and shipped with warranty. This model is quote-only. Current-generation AI infrastructure barely circulates on the secondary market yet, so tell us the airflow direction, uplink plan and quantity you need and a specialist will come back to you on sourcing and availability.

Specifications