H3C S6850-56HF Data Center Switch

The H3C S6850-56HF is a high-density, fixed-form-factor 100G data center switch engineered for deployment as both a spine and leaf node in modern Clos-based network fabrics. Built on a high-performance merchant silicon ASIC, the switch delivers a total switching capacity of 6.4 Tbps with a forwarding rate of 2,400 Mpps, supporting 48 ports of 100GbE QSFP28 alongside 8 ports of 400GbE QSFP-DD uplinks, enabling seamless migration paths toward 400G spine connectivity without chassis replacement.

Designed to meet the demanding requirements of AI/ML training clusters, high-performance computing (HPC) environments, and large-scale cloud-native workloads, the S6850-56HF supports ECMP-based load balancing across a rich ECMP group table, deep packet buffers to absorb burst traffic typical of GPU-to-GPU east-west communication, and lossless Ethernet capabilities via Priority Flow Control (PFC) and DCQCN-based congestion management for RoCEv2 traffic. The switch runs H3C Comware OS, providing a consistent management plane across the broader H3C data center portfolio.

The S6850-56HF supports VXLAN BGP EVPN for scalable overlay fabric construction, enabling multi-tenant segmentation and workload mobility across physical infrastructure. Comprehensive telemetry capabilities including INT (In-band Network Telemetry) and streaming gRPC-based telemetry allow operations teams to maintain granular visibility into traffic flows and congestion events. The switch ships in a compact 1U rack form factor with front-to-rear and rear-to-front airflow options, redundant hot-swappable power supplies, and is suitable for deployment in both greenfield data center builds and expansion of existing H3C-based fabric environments.

Ideal for

• Spine layer node in large-scale Clos fabric architectures interconnecting multiple leaf switches within enterprise and cloud data centers
• Leaf switch in AI/ML GPU cluster networks requiring lossless RoCEv2 transport with PFC and DCQCN congestion management for distributed training workloads
• High-density 100G server-access aggregation for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments requiring low-latency east-west traffic handling
• VXLAN BGP EVPN overlay fabric underlay, supporting multi-tenant workload isolation and virtual machine or container mobility across the data center
• High-performance computing (HPC) interconnect switch providing non-blocking bandwidth and deep buffer capabilities for MPI-based parallel applications
• Data center fabric upgrade path for organizations migrating from 10/25G leaf-spine designs toward 100G and 400G core connectivity without full infrastructure replacement

Technical specifications

Available from Omnixon Global. Submit an RFQ and our team will confirm configuration and availability for your order.