The H3C S5590-EI series switches are a new generation of high-performance, high-port-density, and high-security Layer 3 Ethernet switches developed by H3C Technologies Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as H3C) using professional ASIC technology. They support IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack management and forwarding, static routing protocols and routing protocols such as RIP, OSPF, BGP, and ISIS, and support rich management and security features. They are gigabit Layer 3 Ethernet switch products for converged service networks.

In campus networks, the H3C S5590-EI series switches can serve as aggregation layer devices or as the core for small and medium-sized enterprises. Downstream, they can provide high-density GE aggregation lower-layer switches, and upstream, they can aggregate to the core switch via 10G/25G/40G/100G fiber optic cables or link aggregation, working together with other H3C products to build high-performance end-to-end IP network solutions.

The H3C S5590-EI series Ethernet switches currently include the following models:

S5590-28T8XC-EI: 28 10/100/1000BASE-T ports, 4 100/1000BASE-X SFP Combo ports, 8 10G/1G BASE-X SFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-48T4XC-EI: 48 10/100/1000BASE-T ports, 4 10G/1G BASE-X SFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-28S8XC-EI: 28 100/1000BASE-X SFP ports, 4 10/100/1000BASE-T Combo ports, 8 10G/1G BASE-X SFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 pluggable power supply slots;

S5590-48S4XC-EI: 48 100/1000BASE-X SFP ports, 4 10G/1G BASE-X SFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-28P8XC-EI: 28 10/100/1000BASE-T PoE+ ports, 4 100/1000BASE-X SFP Combo ports, 8 10G/1G BASE-X SFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-48P6XC-EI: 48 10/100/1000BASE-T PoE+ ports, 6 10G/1G BASE-X SFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-24UXM4YC-EI: 16 10/100/1000Base-T ports (PoE++), 8 1G/2.5G/5G/10G Base-T ports (PoE++), 4 10G/25GBase-X SFP28 ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 pluggable power supply slots;

S5590-48UXM4YC-EI: 32 10/100/1000Base-T ports (PoE++), 16 1G/2.5G/5G/10G Base-T ports (PoE++), 4 10G/25GBase-X SFP28 ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-24X4YC-EI: 24 1/2.5/10G SFP Plus ports, 4 10/25G SFP28 ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-48TS4X2QC-EI: 24 10/100/1000Base-T ports, 24 100/1000 SFP ports, 4 1G/10G SFP Plus ports, 2 40G QSFP+ ports, 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5590-24UXMC-EI: 24 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10GBase-T ports (PoE++), 1 slot expansion slot, 2 modular fan slots, 2 pluggable power supply slots;

Features

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 S5590-EI series switches have built-in SmartMC, enabling vertical virtualization and unified management.

Highly available M-LAG architecture

The H3C S5590-EI 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.

Multi-service integration

The H3C S5590-EI series switches are based on H3C's Open Services Architecture (OAA), which not only provides the functions of traditional switches, but also integrates security module cards including FW, IPS, load balancing, mini-iMC cards, and Eagle Vision cards, making the S5590-EI series switches a converged multi-service bearer platform.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support converged AC, enabling the management of AP devices and achieving integrated wired and wireless management.

High-performance IPv4/IPv6 service capabilities

The H3C S5590-EI series switches implement a hardware-based IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack platform, supporting various tunneling technologies, rich IPv4 and IPv6 Layer 3 routing protocols, multicast technology, and policy routing mechanisms, providing users with a complete IPv4/IPv6 solution.

IRF2 (Second Generation Intelligent Resilient Architecture)

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support IRF2 (Intelligent Resilient Architecture 2) technology, which connects multiple physical devices together, virtualizing them as a single logical device. This means users can manage and use these multiple devices as a single unit. IRF offers the following benefits:

 Simplify managementOnce the IRF architecture is established, it can connect to any port of any device to log in to a unified logical device. By configuring a single device, it can manage the entire intelligent elastic system and all member devices within the system, without having to physically connect to each member device to configure and manage them separately.

 Simplify businessThe various control protocols running in the logical devices formed by IRF are also run as a single device. For example, the routing protocol is calculated as a single device. With the application of cross-device link aggregation technology, it can replace the original spanning tree protocol. This can save a lot of protocol message interaction between devices, simplify network operation, and shorten the convergence time when the network is unstable.

 Elastic scalingIt can be flexibly expanded according to user needs, ensuring user investment. Furthermore, new devices can be hot-swapped when joining or leaving the IRF architecture, without affecting the normal operation of other devices.

 High reliabilityIRF's high reliability is reflected in three aspects: links, devices, and protocols. Physical ports between member devices support aggregation, as do physical connections between the IRF system and upper/lower-layer devices. This multi-link backup improves link reliability. The IRF system consists of multiple member devices; if the Master device fails, the system quickly and automatically elects a new Master to ensure uninterrupted service flow, achieving device-level 1:N backup. The IRF system also features real-time protocol hot backup, backing up protocol configuration information to all other member devices, thus achieving 1:N protocol reliability.

 high performanceFor high-end switches, performance and port density improvements are limited by hardware architecture. However, the performance and port density of an IRF system are the sum of the performance and number of ports of all devices within the IRF. Therefore, IRF technology can easily increase the switching capacity and user port density of a device several times over, thereby significantly improving device performance.

Comprehensive security control strategy

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support EAD (Endpoint Admission Control) functionality. When used in conjunction with a backend system, endpoint security measures such as antivirus and patch repair can be integrated with network security measures such as network access control and access permission control into a unified security system. By inspecting, isolating, repairing, managing, and monitoring network access terminals, the entire network can be transformed from passive defense to active defense, from single-point defense to comprehensive defense, and from decentralized management to centralized policy management, thereby improving the network's overall defense capabilities against emerging security threats such as viruses and worms.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support centralized MAC address authentication, 802.1x authentication, and dynamic or static binding of user identification elements such as user accounts, IP addresses, MAC addresses, VLANs, and ports. They also enable dynamic distribution of user policies (VLANs, QoS, ACLs). Furthermore, they support real-time management of online users in conjunction with H3C's iMC system, enabling timely diagnosis and resolution of illegal network activities.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches offer enhanced ACL control logic, supporting ultra-high-capacity ingress and egress port ACLs, and VLAN-based ACL deployment. This simplifies user configuration while avoiding wasted ACL resources. Furthermore, the H3C S5590-EI series switches also support unicast reverse path lookup (uRPF) technology. When a data packet is received on one of the device's interfaces, it performs a reverse path lookup to verify the existence of a route from the receiving interface to the source address specified in the packet. If the route is not found, the packet is deleted, effectively preventing the increasingly prevalent source address spoofing in networks.

MACsec hardware encryption

MACsec (Media Access Control Security) defines a method for secure data communication over IEEE 802 local area networks. MACsec provides users with secure MAC layer data transmission and reception services, including user data encryption, data frame integrity checks, and data source authenticity verification.

MACsec is typically used in conjunction with the 802.1X authentication framework. It operates after the 802.1X authentication process is successful. By identifying the messages sent by the authenticated device, it uses the key generated by negotiating the MKA (MACsec Key Agreement) protocol to encrypt and perform integrity checks on the authenticated user data, preventing the port from processing messages from unauthenticated devices or messages tampered with by unauthenticated devices.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support upgraded MACsec encryption technology, employing a 256-bit encryption algorithm to further enhance data security. Furthermore, based on a special hardware design, the S5590-EI series switches feature full-port MACsec encryption capabilities, providing 256-bit MACsec encryption for all ports to ensure data security.

Multiple reliability protections

The H3C S5590-EI series switches feature multiple reliability protections at both the device and link levels, employing overcurrent protection, overvoltage protection, and overheat protection technologies.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support pluggable AC/DC dual power supply modules, "1+1" power redundancy, and a pluggable dual-fan reliability design. They can be flexibly configured with AC or DC power supply modules and front/rear or rear/front airflow according to the actual environment. In addition, the whole machine supports power supply and fan fault detection and alarm, and can automatically adjust the fan speed according to temperature changes. These designs make the equipment more reliable.

In addition to device-level reliability, this product also supports a wide range of link-level reliability technologies, including protection protocols such as LACP/STP/RSTP/MSTP/Smart Link/RRPP/ERPS/PVST fast ring network protection mechanisms, IRF2 intelligent elastic architecture, 1:N redundancy backup, ring stacking, and cross-device link aggregation, which greatly improves network reliability. Even when the network carries multiple services and high traffic, it does not affect the network convergence time, ensuring the normal operation of services.

It supports dual boot at the hardware level, 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.

It supports ISSU (Uninterrupted Service Upgrade) and OAM (Operation, Management and Maintenance), fully meeting the network's needs for high-performance, easy-to-manage and energy-saving equipment.

VxLAN features

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support VxLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) technology. 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, enabling automatic tunnel establishment.

Telemetry visualization

The H3C S5590-EI 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.

Netstream Visualization

NetStream is a statistical technique based on network flow information. It defines a method for statistically analyzing network traffic output by devices. Devices perform statistical analysis on the data forwarded by them and report it to a network traffic analyzer. After merging and processing, the data is stored in a database for further analysis.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support Netstream network flow information statistics technology, which can realize traffic analysis and statistics, and establish flow tables to realize one-way/two-way NetStream functions.

MOD packet loss mirroring

MOD (Mirror On Drop) is a technology specifically designed to monitor packet loss during internal forwarding of packets within a device. Once MOD detects packet loss within the device, it immediately collects the time of the packet loss, the cause of the loss, and the characteristics of the dropped packets, and reports this information to a remote data collector so that administrators can promptly understand the packet loss situation occurring within the device.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support MOD packet loss mirroring technology, which can monitor packet loss events caused by specific reasons during the internal forwarding of specific traffic and collect relevant information when packet loss occurs, and report it to the collector.

Rich QoS policies

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support L2 to L4 packet filtering, providing flow classification based on source MAC address, destination MAC address, source IP address, destination IP address, TCP/UDP port number, protocol type, and VLAN. They offer flexible queue scheduling algorithms, allowing configuration based on both ports and queues, supporting Strict Priority (SP), Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ), and SP+WFQ modes. They also support Committed Access Rate (CAR) functionality. Port mirroring is supported in both inbound and outbound directions, allowing monitoring of packets on specified ports by copying data packets from one port to the monitoring port for network detection and troubleshooting. Furthermore, the H3C S5590-EI series switches support sFlow functionality, which samples network packets for precise monitoring of network traffic on gigabit/10-gigabit high-speed networks, enabling statistical analysis and control of network traffic.

PoE capability

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support PoE+ (802.3at)/PoE (802.3af) functionality, providing up to 30W of power per port, enabling remote power supply to powered devices (PDs) such as APs and cameras. Furthermore, the H3C S5590-EI series integrates AI capabilities into its PoE technology, allowing the PoE switches to support:

Fast PoE: After a PoE switch is powered on, it can supply power to PD devices within 10 seconds, without waiting for the switch to complete startup.

Perpetual PoE: When a switch performs a warm restart using commands, it ensures that the power supply to the powered devices is not interrupted, maintaining the normal operation of the powered devices.

Excellent management

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support a rich set of management interfaces, such as Console ports and out-of-band management ports. They support SNMPv1/v2/v3 (Simple Network Management Protocol) and are compatible with common network management platforms like OpenView and the iMC intelligent management center. CLI command line and TELNET are supported for easier device management, and SSH 2.0 and other encryption methods enhance security.

The H3C S5590-EI series switches support SPAN/RSPAN mirroring and multiple mirror observation ports, enabling network traffic analysis to facilitate appropriate management and maintenance measures. This makes previously invisible network service application traffic readily apparent and provides users with various network flow analysis reports to help them optimize network structure and adjust resource deployment in a timely manner.

Professional lightning protection

The H3C S5590-EI series switches adopt professional built-in surge protection technology, supporting 10KV surge protection capability, which can greatly reduce the damage rate of equipment caused by lightning strikes even in relatively harsh working environments.