Allied Telesis SwitchBlade x8100 Series - Manual (Page 10)

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SwitchBlade x8100 Series | System Overview
SwitchBlade x8100 Series – Internal
Architecture
The backplane of the SwitchBlade x8100 Series chassis is
completely passive, providing high reliability. There are two main
interfaces between the control and line cards – the data plane
and the control plane.
The data plane switching fabric is comprised of packet
processors on the control and line cards, which are
interconnected via the backplane for data traffic through the
chassis. The control plane uses switch chips on the CFC and line
cards which are separate from the data plane switching fabric,
and is used for internal chassis related communication such as
switch management, transferring software releases and so on.
Packet
Processor
A
Packet
Processor
10Gbps Links
Control Card
Slot 6
Control Card
Slot 5
4 x 10Gbps Links = 40Gbps Full Duplex
x 2 = 80Gbps/Linecard Slot
Linecard
Slot 1
Linecard
Slot 2
Linecard
Slot 3
Linecard
Slot 4
Linecard
Slot 7
Linecard
Slot 8
Linecard
Slot 9
Linecard
Slot 10
Linecard
Slot 11
Linecard
Slot 12
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
Packet
Processor
B
Packet
Processor
A
Packet
Processor
B
Packet
Processor
Data plane connectivity
To avoid any single point of failure, the data plane employs a
dual star topology. Two 10Gbps data lanes, one from each
packet processor on the SBx81CFC400 control card, connect to
each line card slot. This provides each line card slot with 20Gbps
full duplex per control card, or 40Gbps full duplex per line card
slot when two CFCs are installed (x2 = 80Gbps bandwidth per
line card slot in both directions), as shown below:
The SBx81CFC960 control cards provide the same backplane
bandwidth with current line cards. When partnered with the
new SBx81XS16 line card (due Q2 2014), the SBx81CFC960 will
be able to provide double the backplane bandwidth.
This diagram shows the data plane connectivity for the SwitchBlade x8112 12 slot chasis. The SwitchBlade x8106 6 slot chassis has
the same connectivity, but to only 4 line card slots, or can be used with a single control card and 5 line cards with half the backplane
bandwidth.