Cisco Switching Fundamentals

This article discusses the architecture of Cisco switches along with CEF hardware switching, 3560X, 3750X, 4900M, 4500, 6500 and 7000 Nexus switch platforms, MSFC, PFC, performance characteristics, supervisor engines and switch fabric. The performance characteristics of a switch are determined to a large extent by how packets are processed. The newer switches now use ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) for high speed hardware switching of packets. This results in much faster performance than packets processed in software on the route processor with multilayer switches and routers. While most of the packet forwarding occurs in ASICs, there is some network traffic such as encrypted packets that must be processed in software.



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