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Cisco ONS 15310-CL and Cisco ONS 15310-MA Ethernet Card Software Feature and Configuration Guide R8.5
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Configuring the Switching Database Manager on the ML-Series Card
This chapter describes the switching database manager (SDM) features built into the ML-Series card and
contains the following major sections:
Understanding the SDM, page 12-1
Understanding SDM Regions, page 12-1
Configuring SDM, page 12-2
Monitoring and Verifying SDM, page 12-3

Understanding the SDM

The ONS 15310-CL and ONS 15310-MA ML-Series card feat ures high-speed forwarding. The
ML-Series card does Layer 2 MAC address lookups through a hash table. Quality of service (QoS)
classifier lookup are done in software and all other lookups are supported by the main policy engine. The
ONS 15310-CL and ONS 15310-MA ML-Series card does not use exter nal ternary content-addressable
memory (TCAM) like the ONS 15454 ML-Series card.
The SDM is the software subsystem that manages the switching information. It organizes the switching
information into application-specific regions and configures the size of these application regions. SDM
enables exact-match and longest-match address searches, which result in high-speed forwarding.
A location index is associated with each packet forwarded and conveyed to the forwarding engine. The
forwarding engine uses this location index to derive information associated with each forwarded packet.

Understanding SDM Regions

SDM partitions multiple application-specific regions and interacts with the individual application
control layers to store switching information. The regions share the total available space. SDM consists
of the following types of regions:
Exact-match region—The exact-match region consists of entries for multiple application regions
such as IP adjacencies.