Allied Telesis SwitchBlade x8100 Series - Manual (Page 11)

SwitchBlade x8100 Series System Overview | 11
SwitchBlade x8100 Series | System Overview
A SwitchBlade x8100 Series with two CFC400s or two CFC960s installed provides 80Gbps bandwidth per line card slot*. This
provides current line cards with the following performance characteristics:
■ SBx81GT24 (24 x 10/100/1000T Line Card) non-blocking
■ SBx81GT40 (40 10/100/1000T RJ.5 Line Card) non-blocking
■ SBx81GP24 (24 x 10/100/1000T PoE+ Line Card) non-blocking
■ SBx81GS24a (24 x 100/1000 SFP Line Card) non-blocking
■ SBx81XS6 (6 x 10Gbps (SFP+) Line Card) 3:2 blocking
Data plane load balancing
To load balance the traffic across the SwitchBlade x8100 Series backplane, a hashing algorithm is used, so that traffic entering the
line card from different individual hosts will utilise different data lanes across the backplane. There will either be two or four data
lanes available between the line card and control cards, depending on whether one or two control cards are installed in the chassis.
These data lanes are treated as a single virtual port (link aggregation group) and so data is hashed down one of the members of
the aggregation group. By default this is dependent on the source and destination MAC addresses, and source and destination IP
addresses. This spreads the data traffic across the backplane and provides a high performance load-balanced system.
Data plane traffic management
The SwitchBlade x8100 Series chassis uses a distributed switching architecture, with packet processors on each individual line card.
Traffic on the data plane is managed by a combination of synchronized hardware tables, and the fact that the system uses an internal
network for forwarding packets as appropriate between the packet processors.
Hardware tables are synchronized on all installed CFC and line cards, so the same forwarding/routing information is available locally for
lookup on ingress of external traffic. Packets that are destined to egress on a different line card are forwarded across the backplane
and on to the appropriate card.
*The SBx81CFC960 will be able to provide double the backplane bandwidth when partnered with the SBx81XS16 line card (due Q2 2014)