3 – Planning
Multiple Chassis Fabrics
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3.4.3
Common Topologies
The SANbox2-64 switch supports the following topologies:
Cascade
Mesh
Multistage®
A cascade topology describes a fabric in which the switches are connected in a
linear fashion. If you connect the last switch back to the first switch, you create a
cascade-with-a-loop topology. The loop reduces latency because any switch can
route traffic in the shortest direction to any switch in the loop. The loop also
provides failover should a switch fail.
A mesh topology describes a fabric in which each chassis has at least one port
directly connected to every chassis in the fabric.
A Multistage topology describes a fabric in which two or more edge switches
connect to one or more core switches. Each additional core switch increases the
bandwidth to each edge switch by 200 MB/s.