Advanced system structure
The distributed structure design is adopted in S8500 series switch, powerful ASIC chip is used in each interface card to provide distributed packet forwarding, and Crossbar technology is adopted for high speed packet forwarding cross interface cards, all of which greatly improve throughput and expansion capabilities of the routing switch. Built in main control board without taking up equipment slots, Crossbar switching fabric provides switching capacity up to 720G and can be set to work in active/standby or load-sharing mode via software configuration. With the arrival of new main control board with dual Crossbars (Q2/06), the switching capacity can even reach to 1.44T, which protects customers’ investment to maximum extent.

High switching capacity, high density wire-speed switching
Providing backplane bandwidth of 1.8T, switching capacity of 720Gbps and throughput of 428Mpps. High-density interface cards can be provided for the switch to support wire-speed forwarding. In addition, while keeping the wire-speed forwarding performance, the switch supports different high-density interface cards and combined interface cards to satisfy the core layer's requirements for high density and high throughput.

New generation 10G interface
The new generation 10G Ethernet interface card provides richer bandwidth and powerful processing capabilities while preserve the compatibility and easy upgrade. Meanwhile, 10G Ethernet provides pertinent solutions for MAN and WAN applications to optimize the network architecture and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Carrier-class reliability design
The S8500 series switch adopts distributed structure to support dual main control switching boards. The switch supports passive backplane design and all the boards are hot swappable. The 1+1 redundant hot backup mechanism is adopted for the power supply system and dual power supply are supported. The switch supports the STP/RSTP/MSTP and VRRP protocols and can meet strict requirements for carrier-class network reliability (up to 99.999%).

Complete security mechanism
The Quidway® S8500 series deploys the 802.1x mode for access user authentication, secure SNMPv3 NM protocol and MD5 encrypted authentication of OSPF v2, RIP v2 and BGP v4 packets. By distinguishing different users of various service levels, the Quidway® S8500 series have different configuration privileges and provide two user authentication modes: local authentication and RADIUS authentication with the standard Radius protocol and SSH for access safety. The rich traffic control mechanisms are supported including ACL based on source and destination IP address, MAC address and port number.

Integrated IEEE 802.3af PoE Supported
Cooperating with the centralized and manageable power over Ethernet (PoE) power supply assembly, the Quidway® S8500 series simplifies the customers’ power deployments through supporting the integrated IEEE 802.3af PoE functions to the desktop access switch. By providing optional choices of the PoE Chassis, power module and surge protection device, the PoE system facilitates the Enterprise campus and Carrier’s network layout to be more expansible and scalable.

Flexible Network Address Translation (NAT) Deployment
The Quidway® S8500 series supports the flexible network address translation (NAT) deployment by providing the specific NAT processing module to achieve the application layer gateway service of FTP, ICMP, DNS, LDAP, H.225, H.245, and SIP etc. To ease the customer’s internal network IP management and speed up the campus network configuration, the NAT processing module provides NAT log, NAT blacklist and NAT/NAPT of Internet access service for all VPN users.

Distributed wire-speed MPLS forwarding
Adopting powerful ASIC chips to realize distributed wire-speed MPLS packet forwarding (MPLS L3 and VLL L2 are supported). Based on MPLS VPN technology, S8500 can serve as P and PE devices in IP MAN network, MPLS-VPLS is also developed to provide centralized VPLS processing capability. In the near future, the S8500 can provide more services in Carrier network construction.