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Multi-switch chassis

Multi-switch chassis description/claims

This application hereby claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119 to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/945,778, filed on 22 Jun. 2007, entitled “COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS”, by inventor(s) Bjorn Johnsen et al. The present application hereby incorporates by reference the above-referenced provisional patent application.

The invention relates to communication systems, for example to a switch system.

An example of a switch system is a Clos Network. A Clos network, first described by Charles Clos in 1954, is a multi-stage fabric built from smaller individual switch elements that provides full-bisectional bandwidth for all end points, assuming effective dispersive routing.

When constructing large Clos based fabric topologies, it is desirable to minimize the number of cables as well as the number of individual switch chassis instances that has to be involved. For those reasons, it is desirable to have a single large switch chassis with high enough radix (number of ports) to enable connectivity to all relevant number of end-nodes in the set of possible target cluster configurations.

However, due to various physical constraints (e.g., maximum board size, number of individual switching elements, stages and associated connectivity, power and cooling capacity, connector sizes and cable management) it may not be possible to construct a single switch with sufficient radix. Also, the entry level cost of the largest possible switch may make it less attractive or unattractive for configurations that do not utilize the full radix.

The present invention seeks to at least mitigate these concerns.

An aspect of the invention provides a switch system that includes line switch elements and fabric switch elements, wherein L groups of line switch elements are connectable to cables that include L links such that each of the L links within a cable connect to a switch element of a respective one of the L groups. A fabric switch element is arranged to connect to line switch elements of one of the group of line switch elements.

An example embodiment comprises a switch system that includes one or more line cards connectable to cables that comprises up to L links. L groups of line switch elements are configured such that each link within the cable connects to a line switch element of a respective one of the L groups of line switch elements. One or more fabric cards are connected to the line card(s). Fabric switch elements are provided on the fabric card(s). Connectivity to the fabric switch elements is such that a fabric switch element connects only to line switch elements that belong to a group of line switch elements.

The configuration of an example embodiment of the invention is such that the radix of the complete switch can be observed as the sum of the radixes of the individual fabric switches, whereby the imposed management model can be that of a single core switch rather than multiple core switches.

Although various aspects of the invention are set out in the accompanying independent and dependent claims, other aspects of the invention include any combination of features from the described embodiments and/or the accompanying dependent claims, possibly with the features of the independent claims, and not solely the combinations explicitly set out in the accompanying claims.

Specific embodiments are described by way of example only with reference to the accompanying Figures in which:

FIG. 1 is a schematic representation of the rear of an example switch chassis;

FIG. 2 is a schematic representation of the front of the example switch chassis;

FIG. 3 is a schematic representation of a midplane illustrating the logical connectivity through the midplane between cards at the rear and cards at the front orientated orthogonally with respect to each other;

• Provisional Patent
• Utility Patent

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