The SDN-enabled HP 12500 Switch Series offers industry leading scalability for enterprise data center cores giving you significantly higher throughput with 24.3 Tbps switching capacity. Along with scalability you get high performance 10/40GbE line cards. With high scalability and performance, the new core switch series extends the value of your installed base and also delivers high availability and resilience with redundant fabrics, power supplies and fan trays.



Customers will find great value in Comware 7 advanced features, including IRF, MDC, SPB and EVI.



Data center optimized



Scalable Layer 2 fabrics: build flexible, resilient, and scalable Layer 2 fabrics with SPB and HP IRF



Multitenant Device Context (MDC): is an innovative data center virtualization solution that enables multi-tenancy, giving customers the ability to virtualize a physical switch into multiple logical devices, with each logical switch having its own tenants



HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect (EVI): is an HP Virtual Application Network innovation that provides a Layer 2 extension across the data center to simplify the interconnectivity of geographically disperse data centers



Data Center Bridging (DCB) protocols: provide support for IEEE 802.1Qaz Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX), Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS), and IEEE 802.1Qbb Priority Flow Control (PFC) for converged fabrics



Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) features: deliver support for FCoE, including expansion, fabric, trunk VF and N ports, and aggregation of E-port and N-port virtualization



Software-defined networking



Supports OpenFlow 1.3 specifications: to enable SDN by allowing separation of the data (packet forwarding) and control (routing decision) paths



Performance



High performance design with nonblocking and distributed Clos architecture: delivers up to 24.3 Tbps switching capacity and 10.8Bpps throughput with up to 400 Gbps per line card slot



High-density 1GbE,10GbE and 40GbE interface connectivity: offers up to 18 interface module slots to scale up to 864 1GbE and 1/10GbE and 288 40GbE ports



Hardware-based wirespeed access control lists (ACLs): help provide high levels of security and ease of administration without impacting network performance with a feature-rich TCAM-based ACL implementation



High-performance processor system: the supervisor module uses three different processors to isolate key tasks: control plane (STP, OSPF, BGP, MPLS, etc.), fast recovery protocols (RRPP, BFD, etc.), and chassis management (temperature, power, etc.)



Product architecture



Distributed architecture with separation of data and control planes: delivers enhanced fault tolerance and facilitates continuous operation and zero service disruption during planned or unplanned control-plane events



Advanced Comware modular operating system: brings modularity, enhanced serviceability, stability and independent process monitoring through modern Comware v7 Operating System



In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU): provides an upgrade of the entire chassis, or an individual task or process, with zero packet loss