Abstract

New H3C Technologies commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance and feature set of the H3C S9820 series data center switches. The main focus of the project was to validate forwarding throughput, energy efficiency, resiliency features, routing and MPLS capabilities, telemetry and automation functions, and lossless Ethernet support for modern data center environments.  

The report covers the H3C S9820 series, including the S9820-8C and S9820-64H. For performance testing, Tolly used the S9820-8C populated with eight LSWM116H interface modules for a total of 128 x 100GE ports. In RFC2544 testing with Spirent TestCenter, the switch delivered 100% Layer 2 and Layer 3 line-rate throughput for frame sizes from 183 to 214 bytes and for 283 bytes and above, with zero frame loss. This demonstrated 12.8Tbps of throughput. Tolly also measured energy efficiency using the ATIS methodology, calculating an ATIS weighted power figure of 1,052.3W and a TEER of 12.16Gbps per watt.  

The report emphasizes high availability and operational continuity. Tolly verified M-LAG for multi-chassis resiliency and GIR for no-loss software upgrades in M-LAG environments. The platform also supported static and dynamic link aggregation with load balancing for unicast, multicast, and broadcast traffic. Routing validation included OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, OSPFv3, IS-IS for IPv6, BGP4+, graceful restart, and BFD with a minimum 100ms sending interval. MPLS support included L3VPN, MPLS TE, and MPLS MCE with RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP support inside VPN instances. Ring protection features included RRPP with less than 20ms failover and ERPS with less than 40ms failover.  

Tolly also validated telemetry, automation, and AI-fabric-related features. The S9820 supported gRPC-based Telemetry, INT, Telemetry Stream, Mirror on Drop, PTP, Ansible, Puppet, NETCONF, SNMP, ZTP, ERSPAN, RSPAN, NetStream, and iNQA. For the S9820-8C specifically, Tolly verified support for 8,000 MAC addresses, 32,000 ARP entries, 16,000 ND entries, 931,000 IPv4 FIB routes, and 466,500 IPv6 FIB routes. Additional validated features included ECMP dynamic load balancing, TCB, PFC deadlock detection, DCBX, PFC, ECN, RoCE lossless Ethernet with AI ECN and one-click PFC, OpenFlow, EVPN VXLAN route reflector capability, and redundant fan and power operation without packet loss. Overall, the report presents the H3C S9820 series as a high-density 100GE/400GE switching platform with strong performance, broad automation support, and resilient data center feature coverage.  

Switches tested:

• H3C S9820-8C — Modular S9820 series data center switch model with eight slots; each card can provide up to 16 x 100GE ports or 4 x 400GE ports.  
• H3C S9820-64H — Fixed-configuration S9820 series data center switch model with 64 x 100GE QSFP28 ports.  

Interface module tested: 

• LSWM116H — 100GE interface module used in the S9820-8C throughput test; eight modules provided a total of 128 x 100GE ports.