Page 1-1

1 Omni Switch/Router

Chassis and Power Supplies

Alcatel's Omni Switch/Router (OmniS/R) is an advanced, multi-layer switching platform (Layer
2 and 3) that supports the most demanding switch requirements. With Omni Switch/Router,
network administrators can replace aging

FDDI

or Fast Ethernet backbones with high capacity
Gigabit Ethernet backbones.

♦

Important Notes

♦

Beginning with Release 4.4,

FDDI

is no longer
supported. Beginning with Release 4.5, ATM, Token
Ring, M013, and Mammoth-based Ethernet Modules are
no longer supported.
Omni Switch/Router modules can be distinguished
from older OmniSwitch modules by the
X
in the
module name. For example, the

ESM-100C-32W

is an
OmniSwitch module whereas the

ES

X

-100C-32W

is an
Omni Switch/Router module.
Omni Switch/Router has a distributed switching fabric. In a 9-slot chassis operating at full
duplex, Omni Switch/Router offers an aggregate 22 Gigabit per second (Gbps) distributed
switching fabric. In addition, Omni Switch/Router offers new high density switching modules,
including auto-sensing 10/100 Ethernet modules that offer high speed network connections to
servers and desktops. (See

Omni Switch/Router Applications and Configurations

on page 1-5
for examples.)
The

Omni Switch/Router

Management Processor Module (

MPX

) module provides the core
routing,

VLAN MAC

learning,

SNMP

, and file management functions for the entire Omni
Switch/Router. In addition, the

MPX

has an Ethernet plug-in port for managing the switch.
Only one

MPX

is required per Omni Switch/Router, but you can add another

MPX

for
redundancy. See Chapter 2, “The Omni Switch/Router

MPX

,” for more information on
the

MPX

.

♦

Important Note

♦

Omni Switch/Router switching modules require an
MPX. You cannot install any version of the MPM (i.e.,
MPM-C, MPM 1G, MPM II, or original MPM) in a chassis
with an MPX.
An Omni Switch/Router Hardware Routing Engine (HRE-X). The HRE-X offers high-speed
Layer 3 switching from 1.5 to 12.0 million packets per second (Mpps) in a fully loaded
chassis. See The Omni Switch/Router Hardware Routing Engine (HRE-X) on page 1-22 for
more information on the HRE-X.
Omni Switch/Router switching modules perform software filtering, translations between
dissimilar network interfaces, and hardware-based switching. Omni Switch/Router switching
modules have an additional on-board interface connector for the HRE-X.