SPOH Technology triggers switch revolution

Today's network is a digital society; in this "Network society", the switch is an important hub of this organization, but we see that the current "network society" is facing serious development pressure, network users in the multiplication of linear growth, network society's function is constantly enriched, multimedia, electronic commerce, New business, such as ERP, and new security risks such as viruses and hackers quickly poured into the network; complex and multiple service applications require "network society" to rapidly improve service quality, while the emerging E-commerce and other key services to the network to put forward higher security requirements.

As the hub of the network society, the switch is confronted with the double test of QoS and ACL, which undertakes the task of relieving and maintaining order.

QoS (Quality of Service), which is the quality of IP data, reflects the performance of IP data transmission over the network. In today's multi-service Network application environment, QoS is extremely important: it is able to classify different types of data and prioritize them based on classification, and then, based on different priorities, line up the various data of the network to ensure that different types and levels of data are passed through the switch, To obtain the required bandwidth and service strategy to achieve the order of data transmission, integrity and real-time, to ensure the orderly and efficient network social operation. For example, a backup data is originally relatively minor, but in the transmission process may cause network traffic congestion; At this time, by specifying reasonable QoS, the bandwidth it occupies is constrained, which ensures that other key applications are prioritized.

The ACL (Access control list) refers to the access controls lists, which can be viewed as a control list where users and devices can get services and information. On the one hand, ACL as an authority to check and manage the network society, each user and device has one of its own permissions, and through access control lists, different access services can be differentiated for different users; On the other hand, ACLs act as "security Police" in the network, through ACLs, network resources can be access to input and output control, to achieve a variety of viruses and attacks restrictions or shielding, greatly improve the security of the network, become an effective "security" checkpoint.

How to adapt to the needs of the network social "upgrade" development, a "decentralized movement" of data processing technology is imperative. In the network society, each port of the switch is the most basic individual member, in order to improve the data exchange processing ability of the whole network, it is necessary to allocate all the data processing functions which are completed by the central switch core module to each port reasonably, and give each port "citizen" with the most sufficient data processing "right" and " Freedom ", to a thorough" port revolution ", through" the liberation of each port's productivity ", so that data exchange really into a" synchronized "era, and thus fundamentally improve the entire network of the operational efficiency and data processing capabilities, and promote network society into a safe, efficient and orderly new world.

I. History of the development of the switch

The contradiction between application and technology is like a pair of contradictions between "productivity" and "production relations" in human society. The development of network application promotes the innovation of network technology, and every breakthrough of network technology accelerates the development of network application, both in the interaction, promote the network application process of human society.

We know that early data processing relies on software.

At that time, the number of network users, data transmission is relatively limited, through the software technology to achieve routing, access control and other functions enough to cope with; however, its performance is severely limited, generally can only reach the kpps level of processing capacity; As the scale of the user network expands, network traffic increases rapidly, the performance of The software processing model quickly overwhelmed the task.

Since then, the era of centralized hardware processing has come.

This period of network began to become popular, the application of gradually rich, switching technology to hardware processing phase, began to take the Hardware Express. By adding a full-featured ASCI chip on the management module, centralized hardware processing data, the machine processing ability to achieve a leap, reached the MPPs level, centralized hardware processing is "at its time."

However, the whole switch relies on a single ASIC chip to deal with all the l2/l3/acl/qos/multicast functions, in order to ensure the network data volume increasing while guaranteeing the speed exchange, security intelligence is only an ideal. Centralized hardware processing takes on a transitional role in the process of network moving to all walks of life and the continuous informatization and networking of various traditional applications of enterprises.

Therefore, the distributed hardware processing arises.

Distributed design has brought a brand-new technological revolution to the network, distributed design is to be equipped with special ASIC chip on each line card, complete the l2/l3/acl/qos/of all data of the line card independently. Through distributed design and centralized management, the whole system is more robust and stable, the processing ability is greatly improved, and the data processing ability is increased to 100MPPS level. However, the distributed processing mode of the card still has its own difficulty to overcome, the realization mechanism of the distributed hardware processing mode of the card is that all the data behavior of each card is centralized in the local ASIC chip, and the large number of ports are processed simultaneously (especially the ACL and QoS function), No matter how fast the ASIC is designed, it is necessary to face the problem that different data processing requests reach the ASIC and wait for the chip to do the resource scheduling, which can not be processed synchronously, which affects the data processing efficiency of the switch to some extent.

Through the development of data exchange technology, we can see from the software processing mode to the centralized hardware processing, and then to the card level distributed hardware processing, the development of switch technology has gone through three generations. This course of development is like the democratic evolution of human society, and the exchange technology has undergone a transformation from "centralized centralization" to "regional decentralization". Each time the change, the data processing capacity and performance of the switch has undergone a qualitative leap. However, facing the new demand of "big data and many services" today, especially in the case of the proliferation of functions such as ACL and QoS, the data exchange technology of switch has realized the distributed design of the card, what is the future of technology change?