Cajun P550R/P880/P882 Switch User Guide
Introduction to the Cajun P550R/P880/P882 Switch
1-25
Extensive Fault Tolerance
All three switches are designed to function as backbone switches.
You can install each switch in your network’s core without creating
a single point of failure.
Extensive fault tolerance features include:
■ N+1 power. Power supplies share the power supply load. If
one fails, the remaining supplie(s) assume the load
automatically and the switch management system warns you
of the failure.
■ Hot-swappable power supplies, fans, and modules - Each
power supply can be changed from the switch front panel,
without powering down the switch.
■ Redundant switch links (using spanning tree and link
aggregation groups).
■ Front-loadable cables, modules, power, supplies and fans.
■ Redundant switch matrix and switch controller modules
(layer 2 only).
Buffer and Queue Management
Buffer and queue management relieves congestion in a network.
Adding gigabit speeds to existing networks means that there can be
a huge disparity between link speeds. For example, anything more
than a 1-percent load on a gigabit link could easily overwhelm a 10
Mb/s Ethernet link.
Each switch employs the following buffer and queue management
techniques:
■ Configurable active backpressure:
— Half-duplex ports use active backpressure to jam input
ports when their frame buffers are full.
— Full-duplex links use IEEE 802.3z pause control frames to
pause traffic when buffers are full.
■ Packed frame buffers for optimal memory utilization. The
memory management allows virtually 100% utilization of
buffer memory.