H3C S6550X-HI Series High-Density Intelligent Switch with 6.4T Switching

H3C S6550X high-density intelligent switch series is developed for data centers and cloud computing networks. It provides powerful hardware forwarding capacity and abundant data center features. It provides high density ports and 1 out-of-band management port (one copper port). The 100G ports are 100G/40G autosensing and each can be split into four interfaces. The switch supports modular power supplies and fan trays. By using different fan trays, the switch can provide field-changeable airflows.

The switch is an ideal product for high-density 25GE, 100GE or 40GE accessing and aggregation at data centers and cloud computing networks. It can also operate as a TOR access switch on an overlay or integrated network.

The S6550X switch series the following models:

• S6550X-32H-HI: 32*40G/100G QSFP28 ports, 4*fan tray slots, 2*power module slots .
• S6550X-32Q-HI: 28*40G QSFP+ ports, 4*40G/100G QSFP28 ports, 4*fan tray slots, 2*power module slots.
• S6550X-56HF-HI: 48*1G/10G/25G SFP28 Ports, 8*40G/100G QSFP28 Ports, 4*fan tray slots, 2*power module slots.

The switch offers high-density 100G/40Gports and a forwarding capacity as high as 6.4Tbps, which enables the switch to provide high-density server access in high-end data centers without oversubscriptions.

H3C S6550X switch series adopt industry-leading programmable chips, which can define forwarding logic according to user requirements. Users can develop new features that meet the evolving trend of their networks through simple software updates.

H3C Intelligent Resilient Framework 2 (IRF 2) virtualizes multiple S6550X-HI switches into one virtual switch and provides the following benefits:

• Scalability—IRF 2 allows you to add devices to the IRF 2 system easily. It provides a single point of management, enables switch plug-and-play, and supports software auto-update for software synchronization from the master to the new member devices. It brings business agility with lower total cost of ownership by allowing new switches to be added to the fabric without network topology change as business grows.
•  High availability—The H3C proprietary routing hot backup technology ensures redundancy and backup of all information on the control and data planes and non-stop Layer 3 data forwarding in an IRF 2 fabric. It also eliminates single point of failure and ensures service continuity.
•  Redundancy and load balancing—The distributed link aggregation technology supports load sharing and mutual backup among multiple uplinks, which enhances the network redundancy and improves link resources usage.
•  Flexibility and resiliency—The switch uses standard GE ports instead of specialized ports for IRF links between IRF member devices. This allows customers to assign bandwidth as needed between uplink, downlink, and IRF system connections. In addition, an S6550X-HI IRF fabric can span a rack, multiple racks, or multiple campuses.

With the rapid development of data center, the scale of the data center expands rapidly, reliability, operation and maintenance become the bottleneck of data center for further expansion. H3C S6550X switch series conform to the trend of automated data operation and maintenance, and support visualization of data center. H3C S6550X switch series can send real-time resources information, statistics, and alarm of RDMA information to the data center operation and maintenance platform through ERSPAN and GRPC protocols. This can allow the operation and maintenance center to perform real-time analysis in order to achieve network quality tracing, troubleshooting, risk warning and system optimization, etc. Visualization can even adjust network configuration automatically and reduce network congestion, which makes it possible to move to automated data center operation and maintenance.

H3C S6550X switch series adopt the next-generation chip with more flexible OpenFlow Flow Table, more resources and accurate ACL matching, which greatly improves the software-defined network (SDN) capabilities and meet the demand of data center SDN network.

H3C S6550X switch series support standard OpenFlow protocol, which can be integrated and managed by H3C or mainstream cloud platforms to support flexible network customization and automated management. Users and third-party controllers can use standard interfaces to develop and deploy a dedicated network management strategy for rapid business deployment, functional expansion, and intelligent device management.

The switch supports abundant data center features, including:

• FCoE: Allows transmission of FC packets over Ethernet so that FC SAN services and LAN services can run over the same network infrastructure.
• PFC, ECN, and DCBX: Helps provide FC storage and high-performance computing services with low-latency and no data loss.
• VXLAN: The switch can operate as a high-performance VXLAN hardware gateway to support 16M multitenant data center services. In conjunction with the H3C cloud management platform, the switch can be used to set up an agile, resilient, highly available high-performance Layer 2 network, with support for long-distance virtual machine mobility, data mobility, and business continuity.
• DCB, RoCE, and OAM: Provides high-performance services.