IBM 9077 manual Media Adapters At-a-Glance, Benefits of the GRF

MulticastIP Multicast and OSPF Multicast

EGPExterior Gateway Protocol

BGPBorder Gateway Protocol Version 3 or 4 (BGP 3 or 4)

More details about the various protocols are in Section 2.2.2, “Supported Routing Protocols” on page 20.

2.1.7 Media Adapters At-a-Glance

Available IP forwarding media cards are:

•1-port 100 Mbyte/s Switch Adapter

•8-port 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet cards

•2-port 155 Mbit/s OC-3 ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode UNI 3.0/3.1)

•1-port 622 Mbit/s OC-12 ATM

•4-port 100 Mbit/s FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface)

•1-port 800 Mbit/s HIPPI (High Performance Parallel Interface)

•2-port 52 Mbit/s or 45 Mbit/s DS-3 HSSI (High Speed Serial Interface)

•1-port 155 Mbit/s IP/SONET OC-3c

More details are in Section 2.3.8, “Other Media Cards” on page 39.

2.1.8 Benefits of the GRF

The crosspoint switch is a nonblocking crossbar. This architecture is faster than an RS/6000 SP node, in which media adapters communicate through a shared microchannel bus.

To take advantage of the fast I/O provided by the crosspoint switch, fast route table access time is required. The GRF can store up to 150,000 routes in memory on each media card, while an RS/6000 SP node can store only hundreds. It is said that you need about 50,000 routes for the whole Internet. This means that the GRF is able to retrieve a route faster than an RS/6000 SP node.

The GRF is able to route up to 2.8 million packets per second for the 4-slot model and 10 million packets per second for the 16-slot model.

All the media adapters on the GRF are hot-pluggable. This differs from using an RS/6000 SP node as your router. Should any network adapter on the RS/6000 SP node fail, the node has to be brought down to replace the faulty

16IBM 9077 SP Switch Router: Get Connected to the SP Switch