Routing And Forwarding Tables; Optimizing The 10-Gbe Port Configuration For Wire Speed; Grouped To A 14 .4-Gbps Channel; Ports Grouped To A 14 .4-Gbps Channel - HP ProCurve 6600 Switch Series Technical Overview

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Routing and forwarding tables

The ProCurve 6600 Switch Series has several routing and forwarding table features that enhance routing and
switching performance . Every NG/NGX interface has its own "best-match prefix" routing table that contains
IP routes and is used for determining how to route the vast majority of incoming packets . Using the best-match
prefix routing table is extremely fast and enables wire-speed routing to be achieved . If the best-match prefix
routing table does not contain an entry that can be used to determine the route of a received packet, then the
main routing table is used . The main routing table can contain up to 10,000 routing table entries .
For Layer 2 forwarding, each switch has a forwarding or MAC table that can contain up to 65,536 entries
(64K) .

Optimizing the 10-GbE port configuration for wire speed

For the 6600-24XG and 6600-24G-4XG switches, where the 10-GbE interfaces are oversubscribed
40G:28 .8G, these switches are designed to deliver full 10-Gbps wire speed to either one or two ports that are
in a linked state with another device . When three or four ports per block of four 10-GbE ports are in a linked
state, the group of 4 x 10-GbE ports support an aggregate bandwidth of 28 .8 Gbps across the linked ports .
Note: The 6600-48G-4XG switch supports full line rate 10-Gb performance, so this section does not apply to
that particular switch .
As illustrated in Figure 18, internally, there are two 14 .4-Gbps channels between each four-port 10-GbE block
and the switch fabric .
Fabric modules Fabric Modules
14.4-Gbps
14.4 Gbps
channel
Channel
1 1
10 GbE ports
10-GbE ports
Figure 18: 4-port 10-GbE blocks showing how ports are grouped to a 14.4-Gbps channel
When any two 10-GbE ports within a 4-port block are in a linked state, each port automatically operates on its
own channel, which provides 10 Gbps of bandwidth for each port . The two ports are dynamically mapped to
an available high-speed channel and support full 10-GbE wire-speed operation .
Figure 19: 10-GbE module architecture showing four ports grouped to a 14.4-Gbps channel
or
14.4-Gbps
14.4 Gbps
channel
Channel
4 4
2 2 3 3
Fabric modules Fabric Modules
14.4-Gbps 14.4-Gbps
14.4 Gbps 14.4 Gbps
channel
Channel
1 1 4 2 2
4
10 GbE ports 10-GbE ports
Fabric modules Fabric Modules
14.4-Gbps 14.4-Gbps
14.4 Gbps 14.4 Gbps
channel channel
Channel Channel
4 4
2 2
1 1 3 3
10 GbE ports
10-GbE ports
channel
Channel
3
3