The key characteristic is that all the copper cabling is inside the rack and most of the cables connecting servers to the rack switch are short RJ45 patch cables. Normally, the top-of-rack switch is fixed low-profile (1RU/2U) configuration.

However, ToR switch can be placed anywhere inside a rack and connected to aggregation switches via fiber optic cables. The top-of-rack switch is usually placed at the top of the server rack for easier accessibility and cleaner cable management, which is the coming of its name. In the top-of-rack design, servers connect to one Ethernet switch or two (for example, gigabit Ethernet switch or 10GbE switch) installed inside the rack. But actually, top-of-rack switch is one kind of various switches located or installed inside a rack. There is no precise saying about top-of-rack switch definition on wiki and other sites. However, what is top-of-rack switch and how to buy it when needing? Let’s find out the answers together with the illustration below. You may heard about it that top-of-rack switch is very popular to support power required for large installations and the ToR design is very convenient for servers to connect. When it comes to server connecting in data center, network switch is a vital part.

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