Features

High expandability to protect investment

As the bandwidth of user terminals keeps increasing, users will ultimately face saturated gigabit aggregated links and it will be the future development trend to provide multiple 10GE links. H3C S5500-EI series supports two extension slots and each slot supports 1-port or 2-port 10GE extension modules. Therefore, the switch reserves the ability to further support 10GE interfaces in Gigabit convergence or access and thus maximally protects the user’s investment.

The evolution from IPv4 to IPv6 is an inevitable trend of Ethernet development. The network equipment’s support for IPv6 not merely means the simple availability but means that the network equipment must reach the critical industrial standards. The S5500-EI has already passed the second phase of IPv6 Ready Forum certification that is the most authoritative worldwide. Based on the hardware IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack platform, the S5500-EI supports abundant IPv4 and IPv6 L3 routing protocols, multicast protocol and policy routing mechanism to implement smooth upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6.

Comprehensive security control policies

The H3C S5500-SI Series support EAD(Endpoint Admission Defense), It enhances the proactive defense capacity of network terminals, and restrains the spread of viruses and worms in a network. Additionally, it disables the access authorities of terminals that fail to meet the security requirements, preventing insecure terminals from endangering the entire network.

The H3C S5500-EI Series support 802.1x authentication to identify users who attempt to access the network. With the 802.1x client version checking function enabled on a switch, the switch checks the version and validity of the 802.1x client running on supplicant systems to prevent those that use earlier versions of 802.1x client or illegal clients from logging in.

The H3C S5500-EI Series support Centralized MAC address authentication, it controls accesses to a network through ports and MAC addresses. This kind of authentication requires no client software. When operating in centralized MAC address authentication mode, a switch begins to authenticate the user if it detects a new user MAC address. Further more, the H3C S5500-EI Series can Perform 802.1x authentication and MAC address-based authentication simultaneously.

H3C S5500-EI series provides enhanced ACL ，supports ingress and egress ACLs of a super-large capacity as well as VLAN-based ACL , which avoids ACL resource waste while simplifying the user’s configuration process. Moreover, the S5500-EI series supports the Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) technology, which means that the equipment will check the path in a reverse manner to verify if the route from the receiving interface to the source address given in the packet really exists upon receipt of a data packet on one of its interfaces, that is, the equipment will verify the authenticity of the route and delete the data packet if the route does not exist, so as to effectively eradicate source address spoofing that is ever spreading in today’s networks.

High reliability

The S5500-EI series provides equipment-level and link-level reliability protection. All switch models support 1+1 redundancy power supply. Among them, the S5500-28F-EI supports pluggable modular redundancy power supplies, that is, we can flexibly configure AC or DC power modules according to the needs of the actual environment. Moreover, the switch supports fault detection and alarm of its power supply and fans, and can automatically adjust the speed of fans according to temperature changes. All these enable this box switch series to provide the high reliability of a chassis switch.

Besides equipment-level reliability protection, the switch also supports abundant link reliability technologies such as STP/RSTP/MSTP, greatly improving redundant back-up for links and fault tolerance capability, so that the network can run with high stability; LACP, it is a simple and cost efficient way to expand the bandwidth of a switch port and balance the traffic among all the ports in a link aggregation. In addition, connection reliability is enhanced.

Multi-service support capability

The switch supports the Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology to provide power via the Ethernet links to the powered devices (e.g. IP Phone, Wireless AP, etc.), so that we do not need to separately deploy a power system for the devices on site and thus can greatly lower the cost in terminal equipment cabling and management. The switch also supports the Voice VLAN technology. It identifies the voice streams at its ports and adds the corresponding access port to the Voice VLAN, which provides dedicated channels for voice traffic. It automatically issues priority rules to ensure the voice streams are transmitted in the first priority and thus guarantee the conversation quality. By setting the Voice VLAN security feature, the switch will only permit voice traffic to pass and thus effectively prevent burst traffic from impacting the voice traffic inside the Voice VLAN.

Abundant QoS policies

H3C S5500-EI series supports L2~L4 complex flow classification based on the source MAC address, destination MAC address, source IP address, destination IP address, port, protocol or VLAN. It provides flexible queue scheduling algorithms; supports the setting based on ports and queues; supports three scheduling modes: Strict Priority (SP), Weighted Round Robin (WRR) and SP+WRR; supports the Committed Access Rate (CAR) function with the minimum granularity of 64 kbps; supports port mirroring in the outbound and inbound directions, which is used for monitoring the packets on the specified port and duplicating the data packets on the port to the monitoring port so as to implement network detection and troubleshooting.

Excellent manageability

H3C S5500-EI series supports SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) v1/v2/v3. It supports universal NM platforms like Open View and the H3C iMC (Intelligent Management Centre). It facilitates equipment management by supporting CLI, Web NMS, Telnet and HGMP, and supports numerous encryption modes such as SSH2.0 so as to make management much safer.

H3C S5500-EI series supports MAC-based VLANs. This function well solves the intelligent and flexible management need of mobile office, and may be combined with the particular issuance of ACL polices in the global mode and the VLAN mode to greatly save hardware resources while simplifying the user’s configuration process. What’s more, the switch supports the sFlow function and can randomly sample the inbound and outbound packets according to the set ratio to flexibly collect packets.