If you read my post on the Tech Field Day visit to HP you know I was disappointed with the technical content and ended up being a bit too harsh on HP for that. Although I did not get what I wanted I did like the direction they are going in. The good news is HP after that provided us with some addition PDF that have more of the info we were looking for. So I decided to look into the switch myself and I have to say if your looking for a new large data center core switch you need to at least look at these switches.
HP – 3Com – H3C ?
I think most people are not that familiar with how high end HP’s switching line is. Many people thought HP bought 3Com for low end switch but the opposite is true. H3C was a wholly owned subsidiary of 3Com but was founded as a Huawei and 3Com joint venture. H3C had a very high end line of switches that HP is now calling the HP A-series outside of China. It was formally called the H3C S12500. They have a number of offerings but the main ones we saw is the A12500. It comes in two flavors the A12518 which is an 18 slot chassis and A12508 is the 8 slot version.
This is the A12518 and as you can see it is a full rack. However unlike the Nexus 7018 it does not need a special rack for airflow. It also has some fairly advanced power and fan control for optimal power consumption to lower the total cost of ownership. A prime example of this is the power per 10Gb port. The A12518 its 54w and the Nexus 7018 is 112w. So it’s half the power per port as the Nexus. BTU’s are half of what the Nexus is which is major savings on cooling costs. Over the course of a year that is a real savings in your data center.
Switching Capacity
As you would expect from a modern data center switch this guy is fully redundant for key parts. The mid-plane is a CLOS architecture and today provides 360Gb per slot (and that is standard marketing math, counts both in and out.) It will support up to 720Gb with future fabrics. It has a total of 6.6Tb per second today and the architecture can double to 13.3Tb down the road. It can have 128 non-blocking 10Gb ports and 512 if your ok with 4:1 oversubscription. The buffers are pretty good too at 256Mb per non-blocking port vs ingress: 92 Mb / egress: 80 Mb on the Nexus. It also is ready for 40Gb/100Gb but I don’t have the specs on that.
Another key feature of this line is the Intelligent Resilient Framework. This sounds very familiar to Junipers virtual chassis. I have read up it some more but can not speak to it with the proper knowledge so this section is going to limited. These technologies (VSS, IRF, stacking, virtual chassis, etc) provide a great benefit in eliminating spanning tree and doubling the links bandwidth. However if you do some searching you will run into some horror stories on failures with these technologies. I would be very cautious with this if I was deploying it. I have deployed a number stackwise, VSS and VBS rings in our data centers because I have not had many issues and the increased bandwidth with the elimination of spanning tree is well worth it for me. For you, proceed with caution.
What Next?
HP has come a long with in the data center switch market with the acquisition of 3Com and has a good vision for what data centers should look like. After really looking into this line of I switches I feel if your looking at large data center projects you need to at least talk to HP about these. After all if your going to consider Cisco for your servers with UCS I think it is fair to look at HP for your networking.