Cisco Systems 8600 Series manual Introduction, General Description, BPX Capabilities

C H A P T E R 1

Introduction

This chapter contains an overall description of the BPX 8600 Series. For installation information, refer to the Cisco BPX 8600 Series Installation and Configuration publication. Also, refer to the Cisco WAN Switching Command Reference publications.

This chapter contains the following:

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General Description

New with Release 9.1

Continuing Features with Release 9.1

BPX Switch Operation

Traffic and Congestion Management

Network Management

Switch Availability

General Description

The Cisco BPX® 8600 Series wide-area switches are standards based high-capacity broadband ATM switches that provides backbone ATM switching and deliver a wide range of user services (see Figure 1-1). The BPX 8600 Series includes the BPX 8620 switch and the BPX 8650 tag switch.

BPX Capabilities

Fully integrated with the Cisco MGX™ 8220 edge concentrator, Cisco IPX® wide-area switch, and Cisco IGX™ 8400 series wide-area switch, the BPX switch is a scalable, standards-compliant unit. Using a multi-shelf architecture, the BPX switch supports both narrowband and broadband user services. The modular, multi-shelf architecture enables users to incrementally expand the capacity of the system as needed. The BPX switch consists of the BPX shelf with fifteen card slots which may be co-located with the MGX 8220 and Extended Services Processor (ESP), as required.

Three of the slots on the BPX switch shelf are reserved for common equipment cards. The other twelve are general purpose slots used for network interface cards or service interface cards. The cards are provided in sets, consisting of a front card and associated back card. The BPX shelf can be mounted in a rack enclosure which provides mounting for a co-located ESP and the MGX 8220 interface shelves.

Introduction 1-1