With the development of the optical communication industry, the demand for data centers is also growing, so ordinary switches have been unable to meet the needs of data centers, and with high capacity, large cache, virtualization, Layer 2 TRILL and other technical features of the data center switch can meet the needs. Switches in the data center have a lot of technical parameters, but what are the most critical parameters that we should focus?

A powerful function of the switch is exchanging which is also the most basic function, so the exchange performance is the most critical parameters of the switch. The parameters that measure the performance of a switch exchange are backplane bandwidth, port density, and switching capacity.

1. Backplane bandwidth

Backplane Bandwidth is a technical parameter of a rack-mounted switch that represents the maximum data throughput between the switch interface processor and the data bus. In general, the backplane bandwidth is in the range of several to several hundred Gbps, and the higher the backplane bandwidth, the stronger the ability to handle the data, but the higher the backplane bandwidth is not always good. Increased costs lead to waste, as long as the line can be able to meet the wire speed can be forwarded.

2. The port density

Port density refers to the maximum number of ports that a switch can support and the type of port, that is, the forwarding capability of the switch. The greater the port density is, the stronger the forwarding capability of the switch will be, the higher the port rate, the stronger the processing performance of the switch. More types of modules are supported, then the more practical the device can be applied to different network environments. With the popularity of 40G / 100G ports, data center switches can already provide: 8 100G board and 24 40G board, these single slot can be close to 1T. In the future, with the improvement of optical module technology, the optical module is getting smaller and smaller, the single-slot can provide 100G port density will be higher, the current single slot to provide 48 Gigabit port rack switch has been popular.

3. Exchange capacity

The switching capacity is the maximum capacity of the data exchange between the interfaces of the switch. The size is determined by the bit width of the buffer (BUFFER) and its bus frequency. Now the switch specifications are growing, MAC address and IP routing can be basically more than 128K, or even 1M, which allows the data center any expansion arbitrarily, using without worrying about the ability of network equipment. Data center switches have the ability to deploy these new technologies in order to play a better role in future data centers.

Conclusion

Data center switches have a number of technical parameters that can influence performance, functionality, and integration characteristics, and the above is one of the most important and critical parameters, and it is highly worthwhile to consider and analyze when purchasing equipment, expanding a data center or using a device.