The PowerConnect 5500 series switches are designed to offer secure, fixed-port Gigabit Ethernet switching solutions which deliver full wire-speed switching performance. With 24 or 48 built-in copper Gigabit Ethernet ports in a 1U form factor, the PowerConnect 5500 series has a total switching capacity of up to 176 Gbps to support demanding network environments. The switches also offer simple management and scalability via a 40Gbps high-availability stacking architecture that allows you to manage up to eight switches from a single IP address, and share the dual SFP+ across the stack for uplinks to the next layer in your network. The switches are designed for Energy Efficient Ethernet (802.3az), which will reduce per port power consumption up to 50% if the link is idle, and further reduction if ports are.