High availability and redundancy

The fabrics support multilevel redundancy, in which all available fabrics are active, and provide redundancy for all other fabric modules. All I/O module slots receive a fair share of the total fabric bandwidth, helping ensure lossless forwarding in the event of failover.

Non-disruptive addition and removal of fabric modules

The switch capacity can scale as more fabric modules are added to the system, with transparent upgrades for continuous operations.

Arbitrated crossbar for unicast

Class-of-service-aware forwarding is delivered in a fully distributed forwarding system that allows fair scheduling in the event of congestion as well as lossless Ethernet capabilities for FCoE requirements.

VOQ

In conjunction with the supervisor module, VOQ provides a quality-of-service (QoS)-aware lossless fabric, avoiding the problems associated with head-of-line blocking.

Multistage crossbar fabric

System forwarding performance is enhanced by a combination of local fabric switching between ports on the same module and centralized forwarding through the fabric for ports on different modules.

Super-framing and frame segmentation

Crossbar efficiency is optimized by the use of super-framing and frame segmentation to provide deterministic latency and throughput.

ID LED

Using the beacon feature, the administrator can clearly identify the chassis and fabric module.