Three of the four product families from Dell Networking are using the Broadcom Trident+ ASICs, but the company doesn't use the APIs from Broadcom: the developers at Dell Networking have written their own Hardware Abstraction Layer so that DNOS 9.x can run on different hardware platforms with minimal impact for the firmware.
This keeps the company flexible and not dependent on a specific hardware-vendor and can use both 3rd party or self designed ASICs and chipsets.
This modular setup is also taken to the hardware level in some product-lines where a routing-module has three separate CPUs: one for management, one for L2 and one for L3 processing.
All features are available on all switches: some switch models (in the S-series) offer an additional license for layer3 or routing: this additional license is NOT required to use that protocol, but only required to get support from the Dell Networking support department on using these features.
The S-series switches ending with a V and some of the E-series line-cards support Power over Ethernet or PoE with the standards for this protocol.
These features include:[5] Dell Networking switches support so called smart scripting.
Both Perl and Python are supported as scripting languages to automate environment specific repetitive tasks or to build in custom behavior.
Virtualisation allows you to create complete (virtual) server-systems running on a standard hypervisor farm.
The open automation framework is an open framework that doesn't rely on proprietary solutions[8][9] On some models Dell Networking switches (currently the S3048-ON, S4048-ON, S4810-ON, S6000-ON and Z9100) it is possible to run an alternative network OS: Cumulus Linux.