Serial Production of MES5500-32, High-Performance L3 Switch for Data Center
11 October 2023 The serial production of MES5500-32, the flagship in the model range of Eltex high-performance aggregation switches, has started. Its development was carried out considering the current requirements for performance, scalability and functionality of Spine-Leaf level equipment in large data centers, as well as on powerful aggregation nodes of corporate and provider networks.
MES5500-32 is equipped with 32 QSFP28 100 Gbps ports (with the ability to work at 40 Gbps (QSFP+)) and two SFP+ 10 Gbps ports, which provide a bandwidth of 6.4 Tbps. The non-blocking switching matrix, minimal delays and high-performance per port make the switch useful for efficient processing of large data amount, for example, East-West traffic when forwarding it between applications inside data center.
Dedicated console (RJ-45) and OOB ports, as well as a USB port are provided for management and configuration.
Scalability
It is possible to stack* up to 8 MES5500-32 switches into one logical device. This enables scaling the network segment as the requirements for bandwidth and the port number increase.
* Implementation is scheduled for Q4 2023.
Power and cooling
For data center equipment and provider networks, it is critically important to minimize the number of equipment failures, for example, due to high temperature or lack of power.
MES5500-32 uses a redundant cooling system of five hot-swappable Front-to-Back dual fans. This enables maintaining optimal temperature regime even when some of the fans fail. The device supports the installation of two hot-swappable AC or DC* power sources.
*The DC power supply is in the final stage of development.
MES5500-32 implements an extended set of routing functions. The switch supports a full stack of IPv4/IPv6 routing protocols (BGP*, OSPF (v.2, v.3), IS-IS, RIP, PIM SM/DM, IGMP Proxy, MSDP, etc.) and EVPN/VXLAN* technology, which enables it to be used for organizing a complete Spine-Leaf architecture in data center networks.
* BGP and EVPN/VXLAN are activated by the license.
Management and configuration
Management, monitoring, configuration and updating of MES5500-32 is carried out through CLI (Telnet, SSH, Console), SNMP and web interface. Different access levels and authentication capabilities are provided for different user groups. TFTP/SFTP protocols are supported for automatic configuration backup, uploading and downloading.
The Eltex ECCM management system will help to centrally manage MES5500-32 and other Eltex network equipment. Automatic detection, inventory, monitoring and configuration functions make network administration much easier and reduce cost of its technical support. Starting from version 1.10.2+, the creation of IP fabrics on MES5500-32 and other data center switches from Eltex is supported.
For more information, contact ELTEX Sales Department at foreign.sales@eltex-co.ru.
