Dell is making the most out if its Force10 acquisition, considering the news of several new upcoming offerings that aim to expand the hardware giant’s footprint in this area.

First up is the MXL 40GbE switch for the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade system; the first of its kind made by Dell, at least in terms of speed. It’s also available in a 10 gigabyte edition.

The company claims that it offers ten times the performance the previous generation delivering, citing the results of an internal test conducted earlier this month. A bigger highlight, however, is that MXL was developed with OpenFlow in mind, the standard for the still emerging software-defined networking trend: this is also where Dell will be showcasing the tech during the Interop conference next month–OpenFlow was big at the gathering last year.

The new switch is only one portion of today’s product update. For one, the Force10 Operating System (the platform that powers MXL) has been updated to include support for Virtual Link Trunking among other additions, and a tool called Fabric Manager has been debuted.

“Dell announced Dell Fabric Manager, a new offering designed expressly for configuring, managing and monitoring Dell Distributed Core deployments in data centers. Dell Fabric Manager provides a single, system-level view into Distributed Core deployments of any size designed to greatly reduce configuration time, and simplifying ongoing management and monitoring.”

The software is introduced alongside the fifth version of Open Manage Network Manager, a centralized console clients can use manage their networking environment after they got it up and running – preferably using Fabric Manger.

Dell is getting involved in the networking layer that transports companies’ data, as well as the way they store and analyze it. Cloud partnerships are the method of choice in this area.