Allied Telesis AT-SBx31CFC960 - Manual (Page 206)

Chapter 9: Powering On the Chassis
206
Monitoring the Initialization Process
The controller and line cards perform an initialization process when you
power on or reset the chassis. The process may have up to three phases.
The number of phases and their durations depend on the number of
controller cards in the chassis. There are three possible configurations:
 Configuration 1: Chassis with one controller card.
The initialization process for a chassis that has only one controller
card has two phases. The entire process takes approximately two
minutes. In the first phase the controller card initializes its
management software. In the second phase the line cards initialize
their management software and receive their configuration settings
from the controller card. The controller and line cards begin
forwarding network traffic at the completion of the initialization
process.
 Configuration 2: Chassis with two controller cards that have
identical configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two controller cards has
three phases. The first two phases are the same as in configuration
1. At their completion, the Ethernet line cards begin to forward
traffic from their ports and the active controller card starts to
forward traffic across the backplane. At this point, the available
backplane bandwidth for each line card slot is 20Gbps.
In the third phase the inactive controller card synchronizes its
database and load files with the active card. If the databases and
files are already the same, the third phase requires about thirty
seconds, after which the inactive controller card joins with the
active card in forwarding packets across the backplane, to provide
each line card slot with 40Gbps of backplane bandwidth.
 Configuration 3: Chassis with two controller cards that have
different configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two controller cards has
three phases. At the completion of the first two phases, which are
the same as in configuration 1, the Ethernet line cards begin to
forward traffic from their ports and the active controller card starts
to forward traffic across the backplane. At this point, the available
backplane bandwidth for each line card slot is 20Gbps.
During the third phase, the inactive controller card synchronizes its
configuration database and load files with the active controller
card. The length of the third phase depends on the differences in
the files, and may take several minutes to complete. During the
synchronization, the inactive controller card does not forward traffic