Allied Telesis AT-SBx31CFC960 - Manual (Page 66)

Chapter 3: Overview of the AT-SBx31CFC960 Controller Fabric Card
66
Guidelines
Here are a few of the functions of the controller card:
 Chassis management — The controller card is used to manage
the Ethernet line cards. You may manage the chassis locally
through the Console RS-232 port on the controller card or remotely
using Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH), and SNMP clients from
workstations on your network.
 Management software — The controller card stores the
AlliedWareNSP Management Software for itself as well as for the
Ethernet line cards, and downloads the firmware to the cards over
the backplane in the chassis when the chassis is powered on or
reset, as part of the initialization process.
 Configuration settings — The controller card also maintains a
configuration database in which it stores its own settings as well as
the settings of the Ethernet line cards. When a change is made to
a configuration setting on a line card, the controller card transmits
the change over the backplane to the appropriate line card and
updates its configuration database. The database is retained even
when the chassis is powered off because controller card stores it in
nonvolatile memory. You may download the database to a
management workstation or network server to maintain a history of
configurations or to transfer a configuration to multiple chassis.
 Backplane management — The controller card manages the
backplane in the chassis, which the line cards use to forward traffic
to each other when the ingress and egress ports of packets are
located on different cards. The bandwidth of the backplane
depends on the number of controller cards in the chassis. The
chassis has 20Gbps per line card slot of backplane bandwidth
when the chassis has one controller card and 40Gbps per slot with
two controller cards.
Here are the guidelines for the controller card:
 The chassis must have at least one controller card. The line cards
do not forward traffic without at least one controller card in the
chassis.
 The chassis may have either one or two controller cards.
 Two controller cards are recommended for redundancy and to
increase the per slot backplane bandwidth from 20 to 40Gbps.
 The controller cards are installed in slots 4 and 5 in the chassis.
Here are other features of the controller card:
 LEDs for monitoring the status of the Ethernet line cards.