The foundation for Super Spine: launching the MES5700-32 switch with 400G ports into mass production

23 April 2026

The foundation for Super Spine

In January, we announced the development of a new Eltex data center switch series featuring 400G ports. At that time, the flagship MES5700-32 was undergoing pre-production testing. This stage is now complete: the switch has entered mass production and is available for ordering.

MES5700-32 is designed for scenarios where 100G ports may no longer be sufficient: large-scale data centers, cloud platforms, and computing clusters. Within an IP fabric based on Eltex equipment, the model operates at the Super Spine layer, aggregating traffic from all lower-level data center switches. In environments where 100G host connectivity is required, the switch can also function at the Spine layer.

“In the era of scaling AI clusters and supercomputers, the transition to 400G is not just an evolution of bandwidth, but a critical requirement for eliminating interconnect bottlenecks. Port density and energy efficiency directly impact the time required to train language models and process large-scale datasets. MES5700-32 was specifically designed to address these challenges”.

Roman Polukhin, Broadband Product Manager at Eltex

Performance

MES5700-32 has a throughput of 25.6 Tbps. This level of performance is enabled by 32 high-performance 400G QSFP56-DD ports. Additional 10G SFP+ ports are used for management and monitoring.

The main ports of MES5700-32 support breakout mode, allowing a single 400G interface to be split into four 100G interfaces. This provides flexibility in network design, enabling connections to both 400G nodes and a large number of 100G devices without compromising efficiency.

The switch meets data center requirements for fault tolerance, offering Front-to-Back or Back-to-Front cooling options, as well as redundant power supplies, both with hot-swappable support.

IP fabric capabilities

MES5700-32 supports EVPN/VXLAN for building overlay networks. The features currently available for deploying a modern IP fabric are listed below.

Data Center Bridging feature development

One of the key areas in which we are continuously enhancing MES5700-32 and other Eltex data center switches is Data Center Bridging (DCB) support. Our ultimate goal is to enable the deployment of lossless networks based on MES5700-32 for AI environments and high-performance computing clusters using RoCEv2.

In the current firmware version, Priority Flow Control (PFC) is already available. The following features are planned for upcoming releases:

In Q3 of this year, we plan to introduce two key DCB features: Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) for bandwidth management and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
In Q1 2027, we will add Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX) for automatic negotiation of PFC and ETS parameters between devices, as well as Dynamic Load Balancing (DLB).