In-depth analysis of the system development of Ethernet Switches

There are many things worth learning about Ethernet switches. Here we mainly introduce the development of the Ethernet switch system. At present, more and more manufacturers are entering the Ethernet market, new brands and new products are emerging, and there seems to be a trend of Homogeneous Competition. However, it is worth mentioning that, as the number of Ethernet switches in the market expands, the quality requirements are also constantly improved. It can only meet simple connection and data transmission functions, and obviously cannot meet future needs.

Cisco believes that in the actual market, the development of switch products is following three major development directions: speed, smart application, and coverage, or for low-end and mid-range fixed port switches, all comply with this development trend.

Speed is a major indicator of network performance. From Mbit/s to Mbit/s is an important milestone in the development of Ethernet over the past 30 years. The arrival of the 10G network age will bring people a completely new experience that cannot be imagined. At present, people's requirements for bandwidth are rapidly increasing, such as the massive data transmission channels necessary for the rapid development of storage networks; a large number of metro networks with Mbps of bandwidth convergence; bandwidth support for a wide range of broadband applications, data centralization for large financial institutions, and expansion of complex applications such as enterprise core businesses, ERP, and CRM. Today, the mainstream architecture of gigabit backbone and gigabit access will gradually transition to the 10-Gigabit backbone and gigabit access architecture. Cisco's next-generation switch products, including ipvst6500 and 3750, represent the next-generation 10-Gigabit/gigabit switches.

According to speculation over the years of practical experience and development trends in network construction, Cisco believes that the current switch application technology, following the implementation of QoS and Security switching, voice support will become another direction of development. The intelligent speech service of an Ethernet switch can integrate data and voice transmission. The customer only needs to maintain a unified network system, which greatly reduces network management costs. The voice service over Ethernet not only guarantees excellent call quality, but also supports rich value-added application development. In addition, as some switches start to directly connect to the WAN, more and more switches have some routing functions. Considering the large-scale application of next-generation Internet Protocol IPv6 in the future, Cisco's next-generation switch also supports IPv6 hardware.

Ethernet is constantly expanding its coverage and is evolving towards wireless and long distance. Cisco provides users with a comprehensive wireless network solution, which locates wireless networks in the applications of group users to facilitate their work and use. On the basis of the wired network system, Cisco has established a wireless network to complement wired and wireless networks, so that the two can be well integrated and unified. In addition, Cisco's long-distance Ethernet solution also expands Ethernet over distance. This technology is the Ethernet over the telephone line. VDSL signals are transmitted at the physical layer and Ethernet signals are transmitted at the second layer. It can extend the transmission distance from the original 100 meters to up to 5 kilometers, which is especially suitable for the city range and the speed remains unchanged. Any cable can be supported, greatly facilitating the application.

System Development

From the perspective of system architecture, Ethernet switches can be divided into fixed port switches and rack-type switches. Among them, the switch ports of the fixed port switch are basically fixed with the switch; while each switch port of the fixed port switch of the host machine box switch is plug-in and modular, and can be increased or decreased as needed. Generally, the former is mainly used for low-end and Middle-end network applications, and the latter is mainly used for medium-and high-end applications. The products of these two systems will develop toward speed, intelligent application, and coverage.

A fixed port switch can expand its capacity by means of stacking to increase the overall speed of the network. However, such stacking should not be physically connected together. Cisco's next-generation stackable switch ipvst3750 introduces an innovative technology, StackWiseT, which provides an innovative stack architecture that provides a 32 Gbps stack interconnection, up to 9 switches can be stacked and unified from physical stack to logical data flow management and planning. This integrated and optimized device allows customers to deploy voice, video, and data applications with greater confidence.

The most important trend in the development of multi-Chassis modular switches for the network core is 10 Gigabit. The key of this product is that the component performance in the chassis is getting stronger and stronger. With a more flexible modular structure, it can provide a variety of functional modules beyond the basic connection. Cisco's next-generation ipvst6500 switch is most introduced with the goal of its superior 10g switching performance.

It is equipped with a powerful switching engine and a built-in switching matrix, and provides hardware support for high-performance embedded network management, MPLS, IPv6, and other intelligent services with hardware acceleration, the distributed forwarding technology achieves a performance of up to mpps. Cisco has also developed many new functional modules based on the original ipvst6500. These modules are compatible with all existing ipvst6500 interfaces and service modules, it provides a cost-effective way for users to port to 10-Gigabit Ethernet. The wheel of technological advances is still rolling forward, and breakthroughs in speed, intelligent application, and coverage have brought Ethernet switches to a new level.