Key Features and Benefits

• − HPE M-series SN2410M offers cost-effective options with entry at 24-ports and a pay-as-you-grow with a software license. It offers more flexibility to add capacity when needed for diverse deployment and tighter budgets.
• − SN2410M switches are ideal for modern server and storage networks, supporting a 1U 48-port 1/10/25 GbE SFP28 with 8-port 100 GbE QSFP28 delivering predictable performance and Zero-packet-loss at line-rate across each port and packet size.
• − SN2410M supports unique break-out cables that can fan out individual QSFP28 switch ports to multiple device ports to increase density. QSFP28 ports break out into four 10 or 25 GbE ports.
• − Optimized port configuration enables high-speed rack connectivity to the server at 10 GbE or 25 GbE speeds with 100 GbE uplink ports that allow for a variety of blocking ratios that suit specific application requirements.
• − SN2410M provides ultra-low latency of under 300ns port-to-port. This is advantageous for flash storage, which moved the latency bottleneck from storage media to the network, as well as for the bursty nature of today’s software-defined and cloud-driven data center traffic.
• − Provides wire-rate performance with Zero-packet-loss across all frame sizes, avoiding any negative impact on applications that could occur with frame loss as unexpected packet loss is unacceptable in modern data centers, especially within a storage network.
• − Capable of forwarding 100% capacity wire rate performance with Zero-packet-loss across all ports while transferring data across both Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
• − Designed to use less electric power than competing switches, with less than 6 watts per port, providing one of the industry’s lowest power draws, producing less heat than competing products, and allowing reduced OpEx costs.
• − Provides enough internal bandwidth to carry all ports at line-rate concurrently. This allows the switches to avoid head-of-line blocking which can reduce a switches overall performance and throughput.

M-series SN2410M

• − SN2410M supports two configurations:

  • • 1U 48-port 10/25 GbE SFP28 with 8-port 100 GbE QSFP28
  • • 1U 48-port 10 GbE SFP+ with 8-port 100 GbE QSFP28
• − Offers cost-effective options with entry at 24-ports and a pay-as-you-grow with a software license.
• − Extremely Flexible. QSFP28 ports break out into four 10 or 25 GbE ports.
• − Ultra-low latency with true cut through performance, Zero-packet-loss performance with DCBX, PFC, and ECN support

User Interfaces: Command Line & Web Interface

• − Industry-standard command line interface (CLI). The CLI is accessed through SSH or Telnet sessions, or directly via the console serial port on the power side panel.
• − The CLI can be in one of several modes, and each mode makes available a certain group (or level) of commands for execution.
• − Web interface - WebUI that accepts inputs and provides outputs by generating webpages which can be viewed by the user using a web browser for configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• − The inventory in the switch system can be accessed through a SNMP MIB browser. These devices are indexed (entPhysicalIndex) using three levels: Module layer, Device layer & Sensor layer

System Management

Management Interface

Management interfaces are used in order to provide access to switch management user interfaces (e.g. CLI, WebUI). HPE Switch Management supports out-of-band (OOB) dedicated interfaces (e.g. mgmt0, mgmt1) and in-band dedicated interfaces. In addition, HPE M-series Switches feature a standard 115200 baud rate RJ45 serial port that provides access to the CLI.

NTP, Clock & Time Zones

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a networking protocol for clock synchronization between com­puter systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks. NTP is intended to synchro­nize all participating computers to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and is designed to mitigate the effects of variable network latency.

PTP

IEEE Standard for a Precision Clock Synchronization Protocol for Networked Measurement and Control Systems (standard number 1588) defines the means to achieve time synchronization in the orders of sub microseconds.

Software Management

Configuration Management

Onyx’s built-in automation infrastructure reduces operational expenses and time to service by minimizing manual operations and eliminating configuration and provisioning errors. Automation tools such as Ansible, SaltStack, ZTP and Puppet enable you to automate fabric configuration and large scale deployments.

Saving, Loading & restore to factory defaults of the Configuration Files

There are two types of configuration files that can be applied on the switch, BIN files (binary) and text-based configuration files. BIN configuration files are not human readable. Additionally, these files are encrypted and contain integrity verification preventing them from being edited and used. Text configuration files are text-based and editable. It is similar in form to the output of the command “show running config expanded”. Automated configuration file backup feature can be used to upload the active configuration file on every “configuration write". The switch WEBUI and CLI can be used to load a BIN or text configuration file. By default, or after a system reset, the system loads the default “initial” configuration file. Support is provided to load a different configuration file and make it the active configuration.

Logging

Logging of system events in several severity level over a configurable period of time.

Debugging

Support save system file collects configuration, status, counters, log files, What-Just-Happened, and WireShark traces for Ethernet modules to enable timely review of problems and facilitate service support. There are 31 per port packet counters and an additional 22 discard packet classification counters to help you identify why there are packet processing problems, should they occur.

What Just Happened (WJH)

As an innovative network telemetry technology, ‘What Just Happened’ (WJH) monitors and alerts on data plane anomalies to reduce system downtime. With built-in capabilities to inspect packets across all ports at line-rate, multi-terabit speeds, WJH avoids time-consuming data collection and manual searches for network problems. In addition, a streaming WJH telemetry application, supported by other management applications, can be installed as a Docker container.

Link Diagnostic Per Port

Enables an insight into the physical layer components - see information such as a cable status (plugged/unplugged), speed mismatch, auto-negotiation failures, signal quality failures, link training failures, forward error code mismatch, etc.

Signal Degradation Monitoring

A system can monitor the bit error rate (BER) in order to ensure a quality of the link and take an automatic action to disable offending ports.

Telemetry

Sampling (histograms) – a network administrator can enable a sampling of the port buf­fer occupancy, record occupancy changes over time, and provide information for differ­ent levels of buffer occupancy, and amount of time the buffer has been occupied during the observation period.

Thresholds – thresholds may be enabled per port to record the network time when port buffer occupancy crosses the defined threshold and when buffer occupancy drops below it.

User Management and Security

• − Different user account types with different privileges
• − RADIUS, TACACS+ & LDAP support
• − System Secure Mode - configures the switch system to run secure algorithms in com­pliance with FIPS 140-2 requirements
• − USA Department of Defense certification – UC APL
• − Storm Control
• − Access Control Lists (ACLs L2-L4 & user defined)
• − 802.1X - Port Based Network Access Control
• − SSH server strict mode – NIST 800-181A
• − CoPP (IP filter)
• − Port isolation

Cryptographic (X.509, IPSec) and Encryption

• − Configuring, generating and modifying x.509 certificates used in the system.

802.1x Protocol

Authenticate hosts (or supplicants) and to allow connec­tion only to a list of allowed hosts pre-configured on an authentication server

Network Management Interfaces SNMP, JSON & XML

Puppet Agent

Built-in agent for the open-source “Puppet” configuration change management system

Additional Management & Automation Features

• − Zero Touch Provisioning
• − Ansible, SALT Stack
• − FTP \ TFTP \ SCP
• − AAA , RADIUS \ TACACS+ \ LDAP
• − JSON & CLI , Enhanced Web UI
• − SNMP v1,2,3
• − In-band Management
• − DHCP, SSHv2, Telnet
• − SYSLOG
• − Dual ONYX™ Software images
• − Events history

Linux Docker Containers

Run your applications as a Linux docker image embedded in the switch flash:

• − Full SDK access through the container
• − Persistent container & shared storage.

Software Components, Standard, Base Models

Ethernet Switching

Interface Isolation

Group interfaces in sets where traffic from each port is isolated from other interfaces in the group.

Link Aggregation Group (LAG)

Several same-speed links are combined into a single logical entity with the accumulated bandwidth of the originating ports.

MLAG

Extending the implementation of the LAG to more than a single device provides yet another level of redundancy that extends from the link level to the node level.

VLANs

L2 segment of the network which defines a broad­cast domain and is identified by a tag added to all Ethernet frames running within the domain.

Voice VLAN

Provides QoS to voice and data traffic in a scenario where a terminal is connected to an IP phone which is in turn connected to the port on the switch.

QinQ

Segregate the traffic of different custom­ers in their infrastructure, while still giving the customer a full range of VLANs for their internal use by adding a second 802.1Q VLAN tag to an already tagged frame.

Spanning Tree

Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) provides for rapid recovery of connectiv­ity following the failure of a bridge/bridge port or a LAN. The following are supported: BPDU Filter, BPDU Guard, Loop Guard, Root Guard, MSTP and RPVST.

Virtual routing and forwarding functions (VRFs)

Virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) is a technology included in IP (Internet Protocol) network routers that allows multiple instances of a routing table to exist in a router and work simultaneously. This increases functionality by allowing network paths to be segmented without using multiple devices. Because traffic is automatically segregated, VRF also increases network security. Currently, Onyx™ supports 64 VRF instances.

OpenFlow - Support for OpenFlow 1.3

OpenFlow is a net­work protocol that facilitates direct communication between network systems via Ethernet. Soft­ware Defined Networks (SDN) allows a centralized management of network equipment. OpenFlow allows the SDN controller to manage SDN equipment. The OpenFlow protocol allows communication between the OpenFlow controller and OpenFlow agent.

VXLAN

VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network) addresses the requirements of the L2 and L3 data center network infrastructure in the presence of virtual networks in a multi-tenant environment. It runs over the existing networking infrastructure and provides a means to “stretch” a L2 broadcast domain over a layer 3 network.

IGMP Snooping

Snooping and updating tables based on the IGMP protocol used by hosts and adjacent routers on IP networks to establish multicast group memberships.

Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP)

A vendor-neutral Link Layer protocol in the Inter­net Protocol Suite used by network devices for advertising their identity, capabilities, and neighbors on a­ IEEE 802 LAN.

Quality of Service (QoS)

QoS Classification, QoS ReWrite, Queuing and Scheduling, RED & ECN are supported

Access Control List

An Access Control List (ACL) is a list of permissions attached to an object, to filter or match switches packets. When the pattern is matched at the hardware lookup engine, a specified action (e.g. permit/deny) is applied.

Other QOS features

• − 802.3X Flow Control
• − WRED, Fast ECN & PFC
• − 802.1Qbb Priority Flow Control
• − 802.1Qaz Enhanced Transmission Selection
• − DCBX and Application TLV support
• − Advanced QoS- qualification, Rewrite, Policers
• − 802.1AB Station and Media Access Control Connectivity Discovery
• − Advanced and user-mode Shared buffer management

Port Mirroring

Port mirroring enables data plane monitoring functionality which allows the user to send an entire traffic stream for testing.

sFlow

sFlow (ver. 5) is a procedure used for statistical monitoring of traffic in networks. MLNX-OS supports an sFlow sampling mechanism (agent), which includes collecting traffic samples and data from counters. The sFlow datagrams are then sent to a central collector.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is the remote memory management capability that allows server to server data movement directly between application memory without any CPU involvement. Simplified RoCEv2 switch configuration automation supported by just one command: roce {lossy | semi-lossless | lossless}.

Priority Flow Control

Provides an enhancement to the existing pause mechanism in Ether­net. The global Ethernet pause option stops all traffic on a link. PFC creates eight separate vir­tual links on the physical link and allows any of these links to be paused and restarted independently, enabling the network to create a no-drop class of service for virtual links.

Shared Buffers

All successfully received packets by a switch are stored on internal memory from the time they are received until the time they are transmitted. The packet buffer is fully shared between all physical ports and is hence called a shared buffer. Buffer configuration is applied in order to pro­vide lossless services and to ensure fairness between the ports and priorities.

Storm Control

Storm Control is a feature which can be enabled on L2 Ethernet ports and port-channels to moni­tor inbound traffic to prevent disruptions caused by a broadcast, multicast, or unicast traffic storm on the physical interfaces

Store-and-Forward

Store-and-Forward is used to describe a functionality where a switch receives a complete packet, stores it, and only then forwards it.

Since the switch makes forwarding decisions based on the destination address which is at the header of the packet, the switch can make the forwarding decision before receiving the complete packet. This process is called cut-through, as the switch forwards part of the packet before receiving the complete packet. Cut-through and store-and-forward modes are configurable as a switch global or per-port option.

IP Routing

IP Interfaces

The following 3 types of IP interfaces are supported:

• − VLAN interface
• − Loopback interface
• − Router port interface

IPv6

IP version 6 (IPv6) is a routing protocol which succeeds IPv4. With the expansion of the Internet and data bases IPv6 addresses consist of 128 bits whose purpose is to allow networks to include a significantly higher number of nodes by increasing the pool of available unique IP addresses. IPv6 packets alleviate overhead and allow for future customizability.

OSPF

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a link-state routing protocol for IP networks. It uses a link state routing algorithm and falls into the group of interior routing protocols, operating within a single autonomous system (AS).

BGP unnumbered

This BGP feature enables a user to establish a BGP session through a P2P Layer-3 link (port or port-channel) without specifying what the IP address of the remote neighbor is, nor what the neighbor’s ASN number is. This feature is useful when provisioning a big data center fabric. It does not require allocation of an IP subnet on each pair of connected switches and simplifies the massive configuration and enables automation.

BGP

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an exterior gateway protocol which is designed to transfer routing information between routers. It maintains and propagates a table of routes which desig­nates network reachability among autonomous systems (ASs).

BFD Infrastructure

Many protocols use slow Hello mechanisms and failure detection is usually within seconds after the problem occurs. The BFD goal is to provide low overhead short duration detection of failures between adjacent nodes and single mechanism that can be used for liveness detection over any media. BFD session is established by the application that uses it. There is no discovery mechanism. e.g. in OSPF BFD session is established to neighbors that were discovered by OSPF hello protocol.

Policy Rules

Route Map

Route maps define conditions for redistributing routes between routing protocols. A route map clause is identified by a name, filter type (permit or deny) and a sequence number. Clauses with the same name are components of a single route map; the sequence number determines the order in which the clauses are compared to a route.

IP Prefix-List

Prefix-list is a list of entries, each of which can match one or more IP prefixes. A prefix-list is usually used to match a specific IP prefix, mostly in relation to IP route destinations.

Multicast (IGMP and PIM)

Protocol independent multicast (PIM) is a collection of protocols that deal with efficient delivery of IP multicast (MC) data. Those protocols are published in the series of RFCs and define differ­ent ways and aspects of multicast data distribution. PIM protocol family includes PIM dense mode (PIM-DM), PIM sparse mode (PIM-SM, which is not supported on Mellanox platforms), Bidirectional PIM (PIM-BIDIR) and Bootstrap router (BSR) protocol.

PIM builds and maintains multicast routing tables based on the unicast routing information pro­vided by unicast routing tables that can be maintained statically or dynamically by IP routing protocols like OSPF and BGP.

VRRP

The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is a computer networking protocol that pro­vides for automatic assignment of available IP routers to participating hosts. This increases the availability and reliability of routing paths via automatic default gateway selections on an IP sub­network.

MAGP

Multi-active gateway protocol (MAGP) is aimed to solve the default gateway problem when a host is connected to a set of switch routers (SRs) via MLAG.

The network functionality in that case requires that each SR is an active default gateway router to the host, thus reducing hops between the SRs and directly forwarding IP traffic to the L3 cloud regardless which SR traffic comes through.

DHCP Relay

Since Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol must work correctly even before DHCP clients have been configured, the DHCPserver and DHCP client need to be connected to the same network.

In larger networks, this is not always practical because each network link contains one or more DHCP relay agents. These DHCP-R agents receive messages from DHCP clients and forward them to DHCP servers thus extending the reach of the DHCP beyond the local network.

Feature Summary

Layer 3 Feature Set

• − 64 VRFs supported
• − IPv4 & IPv6 Routing and Route maps:
• − BGP4, MP-BGP, OSPFv2, route maps
• − PIM-SM and PIM-SSM (PIM-SM over MLAG)
• − User and management VRFs
• – BFD (BGP, OSPF, static routes)
• – VRRP, Multi Active Gateway Protocol (MAGP)
• – DHCPv4/v6 Relay
• – Router Port, int Vlan, NULL Interface for Routing
• – ECMP, 64-way
• – IGMPv2/v3 Snooping Querier
• – Consistent/Resilient Hashing

Network Virtualization

• – VXLAN EVPN —L2 stretch use case
• – VXLAN Hardware VTEP – L2 Gateway
• – L2 stretch use case
• – Integration with VMware NSX & OpenStack, etc
• – Onyx™ certified NSX scale of 1000 VNIs

Quality of Service (QoS)

• – 802.3X Flow Control
• – WRED with Fast ECN
• – 802.1Qbb Priority Flow Control
• – 802.1Qaz ETS
• – DCBX – Application TLV support
• – Advanced QoS – Qualification, Rewrite, Policers – 802.1AB
• – Simplified (one command) RoCEv2 configuration automation

Security

• – USA Department of Defense certification—UC APL
• – System secure mode—FIPS 140-2 compliance
• – Storm control
• – Access Control Lists (ACLs L2-L4 & user defined)
• – 802.1X - Port Based Network Access Control
• – Strict Security mode for DoD Apps & NIST 800 181A compliance
• – CoPP (IP filter)
• – Port Isolation

Synchronization

• – NTP
• – PTP IEEE-1588 (SMPTE profile)

Docker Container

• – Full SDK access through the container
• – Persistent container & shared storage
• – Container-secured mode of work:
• – Limited CPU/memory/SSD usage

Software Defined Network (SDN)

• – OpenFlow 1.3
• – Supported controllers: ODL, ONOS, FloodLight, RYU, etc.
• – NAT
• – True hybrid mode with programmable pipeline

Layer 2 Feature Set

• – Multi Chassis LAG (MLAG), MLAG with STP support
• – Jumbo Frames (9216 Bytes)
• – IGMP V2/V3, Snooping, Querier
• – VLAN 802.1Q (4K)
• – 256K forwarding entries that can be flexibly shared across ACL, LPM routes, Host routes, MAC, ECMP and Tunnel applications
• – Q-In-Q
• – 802.1 W Rapid Spanning Tree
• – BPDU Filter, Root Guard
• – Loop Guard, BPDU Guard
• – 802.1s Multiple STP
• – Rapid Per VLAN STP and PVRST
• – 802.3ad Link Aggregation (LAG) & LACP
• – 32 Ports/Channel
• – 64 Groups Per System
• – Port Isolation
• – 802.1AB Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP)
• – Store & Forward / Cut-through switching modes
• – Head-of-Queue Life Time Limit (HLL)
• – 1/10/25/40/50/100 GbE

Monitoring & Telemetry

• – High Resolution Streaming Telemetry
• – What Just Happened (WHJ) Root Cause Analysis
• – sFLOW
• – Real Time queue depth histograms & thresholds
• – Port mirroring (SPAN & ERSPAN)
• – Enhanced Link & phy monitoring
• – BER degradation monitoring
• – User mode - simplified and advanced shared buffer configuration

Management and Automation

• – ZTP
• – Ansible, Puppet, SaltStack
• – FTP/TFTP/SCP
• – AAA, RADIUS / TACACS+ / LDAP
• – JSON & CLI, WEB UI
• – SNMP v1/v2/v3
• – In0band and OOB management
• – DHCP, SSHv2, Telnet
• – SYSLOG
• – USB
• – 10/100/1000 Mb/s Ethernet RJ45 mgmt port
• – RJ45 Serial console mgmt port (115200 BAUD)
• – Dual software images, each in separate flash partitions
• – Events history
• – Open Network Install Environment (ONIE switch models)

Ethernet Ports Maximum High Power Support

• – SN3420M

  • • Ports 1-6 Power Class 3 (2.5 W)
  • • Ports 7-48 Power Class 1 (1.5 W)
  • • Ports 49-52, 54, 56, 58, 60 Power Class 4 (3.5 W)
  • • Ports 53, 55, 57, 59 Power Class 7 (5 W)
• – SN3700cM

  • • Ports 1, 2, 31, 32 Power class 7 (5 W)
  • • Ports 3-30 Power class 4 (3.5 W)
• – SN3700M

  • • Ports 1-32 Power class 7 (5 W)
  • • Ports 1, 2, 21, 22 Power class 8 (6.5 W)
• – SN4600cM

  • • Ports 1-48 Power Class 4 (3.5 W)
  • • Ports 49-64 Power Class 7 (5 W)
• – SN4700M

  • • All Ports 1-32 Power Class 48 (12 W) – QSFP-DD new method Watt *4
• – SN2010M

  • • Ports 1,2,17,18 Power Class 3 (2.5 W)
  • • Ports 3-16 Power Class 1 (1.5 W)
  • • Ports 19-22 Power Class 6 (4.5 W)
• – SN2100M

  • • Ports 1,2,15,16 Power Class 7 (5 W)
  • • Ports 3-14 Power Class 4 (3.5 W)