Monday, June 13, 2016

The Huawei S5700-EI’s Features and Highlights

You may read the “The Role of Huawei S5700 Series in a Network” to get a general impression. What benefits can you get from the Huawei S5700-EI switches? In this article, we will tell the detailed Features and Highlights of the S5700-EI, which can help you know these Huawei switches well.



Powerful support for services
• The S5700-EI supports IGMP v1/v2/v3 snooping, IGMP filter, IGMP fast leave, and IGMP proxy. It supports line-speed replication of multicast packets between VLANs, multicast load balancing among member interfaces of a trunk, and controllable multicast, meeting requirements for IPTV services and other multicast services.
• The S5700-EI provides the Multi-VPN-Instance CE (MCE) function to isolate users in different VPNs on a device, ensuring data security and reducing costs.
• The S5710-EI supports multiple MPLS & VPN features, including Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) or Resource Reservation Protocol for Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE), MPLS TE, VLL, VPLS, and MPLS L3VPN.

Comprehensive reliability mechanisms
Besides STP, RSTP, and MSTP, the S5700-EI supports enhanced Ethernet reliability technologies such as Smart Link and RRPP (Rapid Ring Protection Protocol), which implement millisecond-level protection switchover and ensure network reliability. It also provides Smart Link multi-instance and RRPP multiinstance to implement load balancing among links, optimizing bandwidth usage.
• The S5700-EI supports enhanced trunk (E-Trunk) that enables a CE to be dual-homed to two PEs (S5700s). E-Trunk greatly enhances link reliability between devices and implements link aggregation between devices. This improves reliability of access devices.
• The S5700-EI supports the Smart Ethernet Protection (SEP) protocol, a ring network protocol applied to the link layer on an Ethernet network. SEP can be used on open ring networks and can be deployed on upper-layer aggregation devices to provide fast switchover, ensuring non-stop transmission of services.
SEP features simplicity, high reliability, fast switchover, easy maintenance, and flexible topology, facilitating network planning and management.
• The S5700-EI supports Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS), also referred to as G.8032. As the latest ring network protocol, ERPS was developed based on traditional Ethernet MAC and bridging functions and uses mature Ethernet OAM function and a Ring Automatic Protection Switching (R-APS) mechanism to implement millisecond-level protection switching. ERPS supports various services and allows flexible networking, helping customers build a network with lower OPEX and CAPEX.
• The S5700-EI supports redundant power supplies, and can use an AC power supply and a DC power simultaneously. Users can choose a single power supply or use two power supplies to ensure device reliability.
• The S5700-EI supports VRRP, and can set up VRRP groups with other Layer 3 switches. VRRP provides redundant routes to ensure stable and reliable communication. Multiple equal-cost routes to an uplink device can be configured on the S5700-EI to provide route redundancy. When an active route is unreachable, traffic is switched to a backup route.
• The S5700-EI supports Bidirectional Fast Detection (BFD) and provides millisecond-level detection for protocols such as OSPF, IS-IS, VRRP, and PIM to improve network reliability. The S5700-EI complies with IEEE 802.3ah and 802.1ag. IEEE 802.3ah defines the mechanism for detecting faults on direct links over the Ethernet in the first mile, and 802.1ag defines the mechanism for end-to-end service fault detection. The S5700-EI supports Y.1731. Besides fast end-to-end service fault detection, the S5700-EI can use the performance measurement tools defined in Y.1731 to monitor network performance, providing accurate data about network quality.

Well-designed QoS policies and security mechanisms
• The S5700-EI implements complex traffic classification based on packet information such as the 5-tuple, IP precedence, ToS, DSCP, IP protocol type, ICMP type, TCP/UDP port number, VLAN ID, Ethernet protocol and CoS. ACLs can be applied to inbound or outbound direction on an interface. The S5700-EI supports a flow-based two-rate three-color CAR. Each port supports eight priority queues and multiple queue scheduling algorithms such as WRR, DRR, PQ, WRR+PQ, and DRR+PQ. All of these ensure the quality of voice, video, and data services.
• The S5700-EI provides multiple security measures to defend against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, and attacks against networks or users. DoS attack types include SYN Flood attacks, Land attacks, Smurf attacks, and ICMP Flood attacks. Attacks to networks refer to STP BPDU/root attacks. Attacks to users include bogus DHCP server attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, IP/MAC spoofing attacks, DHCP request flood attacks. DoS attacks that change the CHADDR field in DHCP packets are also attacks against users.
• The S5700-EI supports DHCP snooping, which generates user binding entries based on MAC addresses, IP addresses, IP address leases, VLAN IDs, and access interfaces of users. DHCP snooping discards invalid packets that do not match any binding entries, such as ARP spoofing packets and IP spoofing packets. This prevents man-in-the-middle attacks to campus networks that hackers initiate by using ARP packets. The interface connected to a DHCP server can be configured as a trusted interface to protect the system against bogus DHCP server attacks.
• The S5700-EI supports strict ARP learning, which prevents ARP spoofing attacks that will exhaust ARP entries. It also provides IP source check to prevent DoS attacks caused by MAC address spoofing, IP address spoofing, and MAC/IP spoofing.
• The S5700-EI supports centralized MAC address authentication, 802.1x authentication, and NAC. It authenticates users based on statically or dynamically bound user information such as the user name, IP address, MAC address, VLAN ID, access interface, and flag indicating whether antivirus software is installed. VLANs, QoS policies, and ACLs can be applied to users dynamically.
• The S5700-EI can limit the number of MAC addresses learned on an interface to prevent attackers from exhausting MAC address entries by using bogus source MAC addresses. This function minimizes packet flooding that occurs when MAC addresses of users cannot be found in the MAC address table.

Fine-grained traffic management
• The S5710-EI supports NetStream. The NetStream module supports V5, V8, and V9 packet formats and provides various traffic analysis functions, such as real-time traffic sampling, dynamic report generation, traffic attribute analysis, and traffic exception report. The Netstream module enables administrators to monitor network status in real time and provides applications and analysis functions including potential fault detection, effective fault rectification, fast problem handling, and security monitoring, to help customers optimize network structure and adjust resource deployment.
• The S5700-EI supports the Sampled Flow (sFlow) function, which uses a sampling mechanism to obtain statistics about traffic forwarded on a network and sends the statistics to the Collector in real time. The Collector analyzes traffic statistics to help customers manage network traffic efficiently. The S5700-EI integrates the sFlow Agent module and uses hardware for traffic monitoring. Unlike traffic monitoring through port mirroring, sFlow does not degrade network performance during traffic monitoring.

Easy deployment and maintenance free
The S5700-EI supports automatic configuration, plug-and-play, and batch remote upgrade. These capabilities simplify device management and maintenance and reduce maintenance costs. The S5700- EI supports SNMP v1/v2/v3 and provides flexible methods for managing devices. Users can manage the S5700-EI using the CLI, Web NMS, Telnet, and HGMP. The NQA function helps users with network planning and upgrades. In addition, the S5700-EI supports NTP, SSH v2, HWTACACS+, RMON, log hosts, and port-based traffic statistics.
The S5700-EI supports the GARP VLAN Registration Protocol (GVRP), which dynamically distributes, registers, and propagates VLAN attributes to reduce manual configuration workloads of network administrators and to ensure correct VLAN configuration. In a complex network topology, GVRP simplifies VLAN configuration and reduces network communication faults caused by incorrect VLAN configuration.
The S5700-EI supports MUX VLAN. MUX VLAN isolates Layer 2 traffic between interfaces in a VLAN. Interfaces in a subordinate separate VLAN can communicate with ports in the principal VLAN but cannot communicate with each other. MUX VLAN is usually used on an enterprise intranet to isolate user interfaces from each other but allow them to communicate with server interfaces. This function prevents communication between network devices connected to certain interfaces or interface groups but allows the devices to communicate with the default gateway.

PoE function
• The S5700-EI PWR can use PoE power supplies with different power levels to provide -48V DC power for powered devices (PDs) such as IP Phones, WLAN APs, and Bluetooth APs. In its role as power sourcing equipment (PSE), the S5700-EI PWR complies with IEEE 802.3af and 802.3at (PoE+) and can work with PDs that are incompatible with 802.3af or 802.3at. Each port provides a maximum of 30 W power, complying with IEEE 802.3at. The PoE+ function increases the maximum power of each port and implements intelligent power management for high-power consumption applications. This facilitates the use of PDs. PoE ports can work in power-saving mode. The S5700-EI PWR provides improved PoE solutions. Users can configure whether and when a PoE port supplies power.

High scalability
• The S5700-EI supports intelligent stacking (iStack). Multiple S5700-EI switches can be connected with stack cables to set up a stack, which functions as a virtual switch. A stack consists of a master switch, a backup switch, and several slave switches. 
The backup switch takes over services when the master switch fails, reducing service interruption time. Stacks support intelligent upgrade so that users do not need to change the software version of a switch when adding it to a stack. The iStack function allows users to connect multiple switches with stack cables to expand system capacity. These switches can be managed using a single IP address, which greatly reduces the costs of system expansion, operation, and maintenance. Compared with traditional networking technologies, iStack has advantages in scalability, reliability, and system architecture.

Various IPv6 features
• The S5700-EI supports IPv4/IPv6 dual stack and can migrate from an IPv4 network to an IPv6 network. S5700-EI hardware supports IPv4/IPv6 dual stack, IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels (including manual tunnels, 6to4 tunnels, and ISATAP tunnels), and Layer 3 line-speed forwarding. 
The S5700-EI can be deployed on IPv4 networks, IPv6 networks, or networks that run both IPv4 and IPv6. This makes networking flexible and enables a network to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6.



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The Role of Huawei S5700 Series in a Network