The H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-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 industry-leading 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 and data center networks, H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-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 10/25GE fiber or link aggregation, working together with other H3C products to build high-performance end-to-end IP network solutions.

The H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-EI series Ethernet switches currently include the following models:

S5580X-48T6Y-EI: 48 10/100/1000BASE-T ports, 6 10/25GE SFP28 ports, 2 modular fan slots, 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5580X-24T6Y-EI: 24 10/100/1000BASE-T ports (including 8 100/1000BASE-X SFP Combo ports), 6 10/25GE SFP28 ports, 2 modular fan slots, and 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5580S-48T6X-EI: 48 10/100/1000BASE-T ports, 6 1/10GE SFP+ ports, 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

S5580S-24T6X-EI: 24 10/100/1000BASE-T ports (including 8 100/1000BASE-X SFP Combo ports), 6 1/10GE SFP+ ports, 2 hot-swappable power supply slots;

Comware V9

Comware is a network operating system independently developed by H3C for use in network devices. It includes a wealth of network functions and supports a full range of network devices, from campus to data center, and from enterprise to carrier-grade. Comware not only breaks the monopoly of multinational corporations and the open-source community, but also drives the rapid development of the national basic network, and has broad application prospects and important strategic significance.

Based on Comware V7, Comware V9 has upgraded and adjusted its architecture to meet the needs of openness, containerization, programmability, and visualization, so as to better adapt to the current development trend of network operating systems.

Comware V9 has the following advantages:

Using the native Linux kernel, Comware V9's functionality is fully implemented in user space, making it easy to upgrade the kernel version.

It supports containerization, allowing Comware to be released as containers. It also supports deploying containers on devices running Comware V9 to run third-party applications, thus enhancing the openness of Comware.*。

By deepening the modular design concept, the business functions can be made independent of each other, and can be deployed independently or released as standalone software.

The architecture fully considers the needs of virtualized products, achieving a lightweight support architecture that makes the deployment of virtualized products more flexible and faster.

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 major business segments simplify the operation and management of small and medium-sized networks:

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 S5580X-EI & S5580S-EI series switches have built-in SmartMC, enabling vertical virtualization and unified management functions.

Highly available M-LAG architecture

H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-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.

High-performance IPv4/IPv6 service capabilities

The H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-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 S5580X-EI and S5580S-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

H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-EI series switches support EAD (Endpoint Admission Control) functionality. In conjunction with a backend system, endpoint security measures such as antivirus and patching can be integrated with network security measures such as network access control and access permission control into a unified security system. Through the inspection, isolation, repair, management, and monitoring of network access terminals, the entire network transforms from passive defense to proactive defense, from single-point defense to comprehensive defense, and from decentralized management to centralized policy management, thereby enhancing the network's overall defense capabilities against emerging security threats such as viruses and worms.

The H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-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 S5580X-EI and S5580S-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 S5580X-EI and S5580S-EI series switches will also support unicast reverse path lookup (uRPF) technology. This works by performing a reverse path lookup on an interface when a data packet is received, verifying 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.

Multiple reliability protections

The H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-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 S5580X-EI & S5580S-EI series switches support pluggable AC/DC dual power supply modules and "1+1" power redundancy, allowing for flexible configuration of AC or DC power supply modules according to actual environmental needs. Additionally, the S5580X-EI series supports a pluggable dual-fan reliability design, allowing for flexible configuration of front-to-rear or rear-to-front ventilation. Furthermore, the S5580X-EI & S5580S-EI series switches support power supply and fan fault detection and alarms, and can automatically adjust fan speed based on temperature changes. These designs enhance the equipment's reliability.

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.

Support ISSU*(Uninterrupted service upgrades) and OAM (Operation, Management and Maintenance) fully meet the network's needs for high-performance, easy-to-manage and energy-saving equipment.

VxLAN features

H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-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.

Telemetry visualization

H3C S5580X-EI & S5580S-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 S5580X-EI and S5580S-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.

Rich QoS policies

The H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-EI series switches support Layer 2 to Layer 4 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, enabling monitoring of packets on specified ports and copying data packets from one port to the monitoring port for network detection and troubleshooting. Furthermore, the H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-EI series switches support sFlow functionality, sampling network packets for precise monitoring of network traffic on gigabit/10-gigabit high-speed networks, facilitating statistical analysis and control of network traffic.

Excellent management

The H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-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 such as OpenView and the iMC intelligent management center. They support CLI command line and TELNET for easier device management and SSH2.0 encryption for enhanced security.

The H3C S5580X-EI and S5580S-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 S5580X-EI & S5580S-EI series switches adopt professional built-in surge protection technology, supporting industry-leading 10KV service port surge protection capabilities, which can greatly reduce the damage rate of equipment caused by lightning strikes even in relatively harsh working environments.