The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches are high-end multi-service routing switches from H3C Technologies Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as H3C) designed for converged service networks. They offer ultra-large switching capacity, high-density 10G line-speed forwarding ports, support for hot-swappable power supplies and fans, and rich Layer 3 features. The H3C S6526XE-HI series is positioned as a next-generation core/aggregation high-density 10 Gigabit switch. Developed based on industry-leading high-performance hardware architecture and H3C's advanced Commware V7 software platform, the H3C S6526XE-HI series switches can integrate wireless control functions (converged AC), enabling local wireless/wired forwarding at the access layer, eliminating wireless control bandwidth bottlenecks, expanding the scale of wireless deployment, and saving users' investment costs.

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches currently include the following models:

H3C S6526XE-32X6CC-HI: 32 1/10GE SFP Plus ports, 6 40/100GE QSFP28 ports, 1 port expansion slot, 2 power supply slots, and 4 fan slots.

H3C S6526XE-48X6CC-HI: 48 1/10GE SFP Plus ports, 6 40/100GE QSFP28 ports, 1 port expansion slot, 2 power supply slots, and 4 fan slots.

Features

1. SmartMC (Intelligent Management Center)

As network scale increases, a large number of access devices are needed at the network edge, making the management of these devices extremely cumbersome. The main purpose of SmartMC is to solve the problem of centralized management of a large number of distributed network devices. It aims to address the maintenance tasks of small businesses primarily using switches. SmartMC achieves unified operation and management of the network through built-in device functionality and a graphical interface.

SmartMC's four business segments simplify the operation and management of small and medium-sized industrial parks:

Intelligent Management:

This mainly includes selecting device roles, configuring the FTP server, global configuration, and configuring the network management port.

Intelligent Operation and Maintenance:

This mainly includes group management, device or group upgrade and backup, monitoring, and device failure replacement.

Visualization:

This mainly includes network topology visualization and management, device list display, etc.

Intelligent Business:

This mainly includes user management: After creating and successfully activating network access users, these users can access the SmartMC network through the one-click armed port.

The H3C S6526XE-HI series has built-in SmartMC, enabling vertical virtualization and unified management.

2. VxLAN features

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches support VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN). VXLAN encapsulates data packets sent by virtual machines in UDP and uses the physical network's IP/MAC address as the outer header before transmitting them over the physical IP network. Upon arrival at the destination, the tunnel endpoint decapsulates the packets and sends the data to the target virtual machine. This solves the problem of long-distance virtual machine migration between geographically dispersed data centers and supports EVPN mode.

3. Visualization capabilities

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches support Telemetry technology, which can send real-time resource information and alarm information of the switches to the operation and maintenance platform via the gRPC protocol. The operation and maintenance platform analyzes the real-time data and can realize functions such as network quality backtracking, fault diagnosis, risk warning, and architecture optimization, so as to accurately protect the user experience.

4. IRF2 (Second Generation Intelligent Resilient Architecture)

The S6526XE-HI series switches support IRF2 (Intelligent Resilient Architecture 2) technology, which virtualizes multiple devices (up to 9) into a single logical device. This provides significant advantages in scalability, reliability, overall architecture, and availability, primarily in four aspects:

Scalability: IRF2 technology allows switches to expand to multiple devices using interconnect cables; it has the advantages of plug-and-play, single IP management, and synchronous upgrades, while greatly reducing the cost of system expansion.

Reliability: Through hot backup routing technology, redundant backup of all information in the control plane and data plane and uninterrupted Layer 3 forwarding are achieved throughout the IRF group, which greatly enhances the reliability and performance of the IRF group, while eliminating single points of failure and avoiding service interruption.

Distributed nature: Through distributed link aggregation technology, load sharing and mutual backup of multiple uplinks are achieved, thereby improving the redundancy of the entire network architecture and the utilization rate of link resources.

Availability: The intelligent elastic architecture is achieved through standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, which can allocate service bandwidth and system connection bandwidth according to demand and rationally allocate local traffic and uplink traffic; it can realize intelligent elastic architecture not only within racks, across racks, but also across regions.

5. Abundant features

The S6526XE-HI series switches feature a modular power supply and fan chassis design, with all modular components supporting hot-swapping. They utilize a modular software platform, allowing for flexible addition and removal of relevant software modules as needed. Through meticulous physical structure and software process optimization, end-to-end packet processing latency is significantly reduced.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative network architecture. Its core technology, OpenFlow, significantly simplifies network management and maintenance by separating the network's control layer and data forwarding layer. More importantly, it enables flexible control of network traffic, providing a robust network platform for innovation in core networks and applications.

The S6526XE-HI series switches support VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN). VXLAN encapsulates data packets sent by virtual machines in UDP and uses...Physical networksThe IP/MAC address is encapsulated as an outer header and transmitted over the physical IP network. Upon arrival at the destination, the tunnel endpoint decapsulates the data and sends it to the target virtual machine, thus solving the problem of geographically dispersed...Data CenterThe issue of migrating virtual machines over long distances.

The S6526XE-HI series switches support ISSU (Service Upgrade Without Interruption) and OAM (Operation, Management and Maintenance), fully meeting the network's needs for high performance, ease of management and energy saving.

The S6526XE-HI series switches support converged AC and can manage AP devices, with a maximum of 2K APs, enabling integrated wired and wireless management.

6. Highly available M-LAG architecture

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches support M-LAG (Multichassis Link Aggregation Group) cross-device link aggregation technology (formerly DRNI technology), which realizes cross-device link aggregation by virtualizing two physical devices into one device at the forwarding layer, maintaining the independence of the control layer and improving device-level reliability.

M-LAG decouples the control plane from the data plane, allowing each node device to be upgraded independently, ensuring zero interruption of user services.

The dual-active access of the device provides device-level redundancy protection and traffic load sharing, while improving system reliability.

Suitable for both overlay and traditional underlay scenarios, offering flexible networking options.

7. PTP clock

The H3C S6526XE-HI series supports the 1588V2 function, meeting the high-precision time synchronization requirements between network devices. Compared with GPS time synchronization of the same precision, it improves security while having a lower deployment cost.

8. iNQA Intelligent Network Quality Analysis

The H3C S6526XE-HI series supports iNQA (Intelligent Network Quality Analyzer), a detection mechanism suitable for large-scale IP networks that can quickly measure network performance. The H3C S6526XE-HI series currently supports packet loss measurement, capable of measuring forward, reverse, and bidirectional packet loss (including the number of lost packets, packet loss rate, number of lost bytes, and byte loss rate). The measurement results can be used to quickly pinpoint the time, location, and severity of packet loss.

9. eMDI Enhanced Media Transmission Quality

The H3C S6526XE-HI series supports eMDI (Enhanced Media Delivery Index), a network quality monitoring and fault localization solution specifically designed for video and audio services. eMDI allows for real-time monitoring and analysis of specified service packets carried by TCP or RTP on various network nodes within an IP network. Network administrators can combine monitoring and analysis results from multiple network nodes to quickly pinpoint the location of faults.

10. Audio Quality Analysis

Multimedia audio and video services are widely used in daily life, with rich and diverse content, and users' demands for multimedia service experiences are constantly increasing. Traditional network equipment does not distinguish between multimedia traffic and other traffic during user traffic transmission. When network congestion occurs, multimedia audio and video services may experience stuttering, seriously affecting the user experience.

The H3C S6526XE-HI series supports a service quality analysis function, which can identify user multimedia traffic based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). When this function is enabled, the device will prioritize forwarding this type of traffic to ensure service quality. The device will also analyze this type of traffic, collect and save traffic information and session information.

11. Comprehensive security control strategy

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches support AAA and RADIUS authentication, and support dynamic or static binding of user identification elements such as user accounts, IP, MAC, VLAN, and ports. They also support real-time management of online users in conjunction with H3C's iMC platform, enabling timely diagnosis and resolution of illegal network activities.

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches offer enhanced ACL control logic, supporting high-capacity ingress and egress ACLs, as well as VLAN-based ACL deployment, simplifying the user configuration process while avoiding waste of ACL resources.

12. Multiple reliability protections

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches also feature multiple levels of reliability protection at both the device and link levels. They employ overcurrent protection, overvoltage protection, and overheat protection technologies.

Hot-swappable power supplies and fans enhance the hardware reliability of the device. The H3C S6526XE-HI series supports dual modular power supplies and modular fan assemblies; all models feature hot-swappable power and fan modules without affecting normal operation. Furthermore, the entire unit supports power supply and fan fault detection and alarms, and can automatically adjust fan speed based on temperature changes.

It supports hardware-level dual boot, using two FLASH chips to store the boot software (system boot program), achieving hardware-level boot redundancy backup and avoiding the switch failing to start due to FLASH chip failure.

Supports ERPS Ethernet Ring Protection Protocol (G.8032). ERPS (Ethernet Ring Protection Switching) is a highly reliable and stable Ethernet ring network link layer technology that can achieve millisecond-level fast protection switching in Ethernet ring networks.

13. Excellent management skills

The H3C S6526XE-HI series switches support a rich set of management interfaces, such as Console, out-of-band network port, and USB port. They support SNMPv1/v2/v3 and the iMC intelligent management center. CLI command line, TELNET, and FTP configuration are supported, along with OAM for easier device management. Furthermore, SSH2.0 and SSL encryption methods enhance management security.