High port density and powerful forwarding capacity

The switch offers high-density 100G/40G/25G/10G ports 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.

Flexible programmability

H3C S9850 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.

Powerful visibility

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 S9850 switch series conform to the trend of automated data operation and maintenance, and support visualization of data center. H3C S9850 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.

Enhanced SDN features

H3C S9850 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 S9850 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.

Abundant data center features

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, ISSU, and OAM—Provides high-performance services.

Puppet and Chef—Helps implement automated operation and maintenance of the data center.

Flexible choice of airflow

To cope with data center cooling aisle design, the H3C S9850 switch series comes with flexible airflow design, which features bi-cooling aisles in the front and back. Users may also choose the direction of airflow (from front to back or vice versa) by selecting a different fan tray.

Outstanding management capacity

The switch improves system management through the following ways:

Provides multiple management interfaces, including the serial console port, mini USB console port, USB port, two out-of-band management ports, and two SFP ports. The SFP ports can be used as service ports or in-band data management ports, through which the sampled packets are encapsulated and sent to the controller or other management devices for in-depth analysis.

Supports configuration and management from CLI or a mainstream network management platform and H3C IMC Intelligent Management Center.

Supports multiple access methods, including SNMPv1/v2c/v3, Telnet, SSH 2.0, SSL, and FTP.

Supports GRPC and provides a flexible programmable interface for customized development.

Supports Telemetry, allowing for real-time, high-speed, and precise data collection.

H3C Intelligent Resilient Framework 2 (IRF2)

H3C S9850 switch series is a pre-built with intelligent resilient Framework 2 (IRF2). IRF2 provides the following benefits:

High scalability: With IRF2, plug-n-play device aggregation can be achieved by adding one or more switches into the IRF2 stack, enabling IRF2 stacking on the new device. New devices can be managed with a single IP, and upgraded at the same time to reduce network expansion cost.

High reliability: The IRF2 patented 1:N backup technology allows each slave device in the IRF2 stack to serve as the backup of the master, creating control and data link redundancy, and uninterrupted layer-3 forwarding. This improves reliability, avoids unplanned business downtime, and serves to improve overall performance. When the master device fails, traffic remains uninterrupted.

Load balancing: IRF2 supports cross-device link aggregation, allowing upstream and downstream to be connected to more than one physical link. This creates another layer of network redundancy, and boosts the network resource utilization.

Availability: H3C Implements IRF2 through standard Hundred Gigabit Ethernet (100GE) or Forty Gigabit Ethernet (40GE) ports. It can allocate bandwidth for business and application access, and reasonably splits local traffic and upstream traffic. IRF2 rules are obeyed within and across the rack, but also across the LAN.

Multiple reliability protection

The S9850 switch series provides multiple reliability protection at both switch and link levels. With over current, overvoltage, and overheat protection, all models have a redundant pluggable power module, which enables flexible configuration of AC or DC power modules based on actual needs. The entire switch supports fault detection and alarm for power supply and fan, allowing fan speed to change to suit different ambient temperatures.

The switch supports diverse link redundancy technologies such as H3C proprietary RRPP, VRRPE, and Smart Link. These technologies ensure quick network convergence even when large amount of traffic of multiple services runs on the network.

Rich QoS features

H3C S9850 switch series support Layer 2 to Layer 4 packet filtering, which can provide traffic classification based on source MAC address, destination MAC address, source IP address, destination IP address, TCP/UDP port number, protocol type, and VLAN.

Each 100G port provides a flexible queues scheduling algorithm, which can be set based on ports and queues at the same time.

S9850 switch series supports five queuing modes include SP (Strict Priority), WRR (Weighted Round Robin), SP+WRR, WFQ, and SP+WFQ.

S9850 switch series supports CAR (Committed Access Rate) function with a minimum granularity of 8Kbps, and port mirroring on both directions used to monitor packets on the specified port and forward the packets to the monitoring port for network detection and troubleshooting.

Comprehensive security control policies

H3C S9850 switch series supports AAA, RADIUS and user account based authentication, IP, MAC, VLAN, port-based user identification, dynamic and static binding; when working with the H3C iMC platform, it can conduct real time management, instant diagnosis and crackdown on illicit network behaviors

H3C S9850 switch series supports enhanced ACL control logic, which enables an enormous amount of in-port and out-port ACL, and delegate VLAN based ACL. This simplifies user deployment process and avoids ACL resource wastage. S9850 switch series can also take advantage of Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (Unicast RFP). When the device receives a packet, it will perform the reverse check to verify the source address from which the packets are supposedly originated, and will drop the packet if such path doesn’t exist.

Hardware Specification

Software Specification