The Enterasys S-Series delivers a powerful combination of Terabit-class performance along with granular visibility and control over users, services, and applications to meet the increasing demands of today's businesses and enable optimization of key technologies including voice and video, virtualization, and cloud computing. Unlike competitive solutions lacking comprehensive centralized management and adequate high availability services, the Enterasys S-Series drives down operational costs through a combination of management automation, a robust and highly resilient distributed architecture, built-in security, and flexible power configurations specifically designed to reduce power and cooling costs. The highly versatile Enterasys S-Series delivers both the comprehensive functionality and configuration flexibility to be deployed as a premium high-density network edge access device, high performance distribution layer switch, resilient enterprise class multi-Terabit core router, or as a data center virtualization solution.
The Enterasys S-Series chassis utilize both fabric-based point-to-point and fabric-less meshed forwarding architectures. The S6 chassis uses a fabric-based forwarding architecture that provides multiple high bandwidth data paths between I/O modules.
Optimized, high-availability and self healing services
Aside from the standard high-availability features of typical wiring closet and data center switches, the Enterasys S-Series includes many advanced self healing features such as dynamic service fail-over, automatic module self-configuration, and multi-image support. Dynamic service fail-over enables each I/O module service to be automatically switched to another I/O module in an event of module or process failure. This "self healing" capability happens in milliseconds because each service is replicated in real- time on every I/O fabric and I/O module. Automatic module self-configuration is another innovative feature that allows I/O modules to receive their configuration from other I/O modules automatically. This is ideal for replacing failed modules without manually reconfiguring the replacement module.
Distributed, flow-based architecture
In order to ensure granular visibility and manage of traffic without sacrificing performance, the Enterasys S-Series deploys a distributed, low-based architecture. This architecture ensures that when a specific communications low is being established between two end points, the first packets in that communication are processed through the multilayer classification engines in the switch I/O modules and I/O fabric modules. In this process, the role is identified, the applicable policies are determined, the packets are inspected, and the action is determined. After the low is identified, all subsequent packets associated with that low are automatically handled in the Enterasys ASICs without any further processing. In this way the Enterasys S-Series is able to apply a very granular level of control to each low at full line rate.
Multi-user/method authentication and policy
Authentication allows enterprise organizations to manage network access and provide mobility to users and devices. It provides a way to know who or what is connected to the network and where this connection is at any time. The Enterasys S-Series has unique, industry leading capabilities regarding types of simultaneous authentication methods. S-Series modules can support multiple concurrent authentication techniques.
Dynamic, flow-based packet classification
Another unique feature that separates the Enterasys S-Series from all competitive switches is the capability to provide user- based multi-layer packet classification/QoS. With the wide array of network applications used on networks today, traditional multi- layer packet classification by itself is not enough to guarantee the timely transport of business-critical applications. In the S-Series, user-based multi-layer packet classification allows traffic classification not just by packet type, but also by the role of the user on the network and the assigned policy of that user. With user-based multi-layer packet classification, packets can be classified based on unique identifiers like "All Users", "User Groups", and "Individual User", thus ensuring a more granular approach to managing and maintaining network confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Network visibility from high fidelity NetFlow
Network performance management and security capabilities via NetFlow are available on every Enterasys S-Series switch port without slowing down switching and routing performance. Enterasys NetFlow tracks every packet in every low as opposed to competitor's statistical sampling techniques or restrictive appliance-based implementations. The value of unsampled, real-time NetFlow monitoring is the visibility into exactly what traffic is traversing the network and if something abnormal occurs it will be captured by NetFlow and appropriate action can be applied.
Update Availability
