High Port Density and Powerful Forwarding Capacity
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.
Flexible Programmability
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 (IRF2)
H3C Intelligent Resilient Framework 2 (IRF 2) virtualizes multiple S6530X 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 S6530X IRF fabric can span a rack, multiple racks, or multiple campuses.
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 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.
Enhanced SDN Features
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.
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, and OAM: Provides high-performance services.
Flexible Choice of Airflow
To cope with data center cooling aisle design, the H3C S6550X 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, USB port, one out-of-band management port.
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 S6550X switch series support M-LAG, which enables links of multiple switches to aggregate into one to implement device-level link backup. M-LAG is applicable to servers dual-homed to a pair of access devices for node redundancy.
Streamlined topology: M-LAG simplifies the network topology and spanning tree configuration by virtualizing two physical devices into one logical device.
Independent upgrading: The DR member devices can be upgraded independently one by one to minimize the impact on traffic forwarding.
High availability: The DR system uses a keepalive link to detect multi-active collision to ensure that only one member device forwards traffic after a DR system splits.
Multiple Reliability Protection
The S6550X 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 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, VRRP, 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 S6550X 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 queue scheduling algorithm, which can be set based on ports and queues at the same time.
S6550X switch series supports five queuing modes include SP (Strict Priority), WRR (Weighted Round Robin), SP+WRR.
S6550X switch series supports CAR (Committed Access Rate) function with a minimum granularity of 1Kbps, 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 S6550X 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 S6550X 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. S6550X switch series can also take advantage of Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF). 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.
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Products and Solutions
S6550X-32H-HI: 32×40G/100G QSFP28 ports, 4×fan tray slots, 2×power module slots . 
Technical Documents
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