CCNA Data Center DCICT 640-916 Official Cert Guide

The Secret Sauce of Cisco MDS: Architecture

All Cisco MDS 9500 Series Director switches are based on the same underlying crossbar architecture. Frame forwarding logic is distributed in application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) on the line cards themselves, resulting in a distributed forwarding architecture. There is never any requirement for frames to be forwarded to the supervisor for centralized forwarding, nor is there ever any requirement for forwarding to drop back into software for processing. All frame forwarding is performed in dedicated forwarding hardware and distributed across all line cards in the system.

Forwarding of frames on the Cisco MDS always follows the same processing sequence:

1. Starting with frame error checking ...