Bandwidth - Line cards

sumesh_un · ‎04-20-2007

What does the term bandwidth when used with respect to a line card mean?is it the pipe available for data transfer between ports on the same line card?also what is a non-blocking architecture?

Jon Marshall · ‎04-20-2007

Hi

Bandwidth on line cards usually refers to how much throughput exists between the line card and the main switching fabric of the chassis. So for example on the 6500 switch a WS-6724-SFP has a 20Gb dedicated connection to the switch fabric.

The WS-6724-SFP supports 24 x 1Gb ports so there will be some contention on the ports. If you use only 20 of the 24 ports then in effect the blade is non-blocking as 20 ports = 20Gbps and the blade has a dedicated 20 Gbps connection to the switch fabric.

Some of the modules that go into a 6500 do not have dedicated connections to the switch fabric. Instead they use a shared connection to the switch fabric which could well lead to contention depending on the number of blades sharing this connection.

HTH

Jon

sumesh_un · ‎04-20-2007

thnks jon

main switching fabric I suppose is the entire data bus for the switch...