Alcatel Unleashed

I'm studying IPMS on 6400 and I have a dumb question, What does it mean wire speed ? and another one, What does it mean that a switch will be delivering multicast traffic in hardware?
I have heard at some courses that some devices are faster than another ones because they provides its services by means of hardware and not by means of software, What does that mean?

Best regards

In wirespeed at wirerate means that each port can send with full speed with the backplane being able to handle traffic.

Honestly most 1U Switches do wirespeed switching today, non wirespeed is more often seen in Slot based systems, where the Linecards offer more speed than the connection to the backplane ( OS9-XNI-U12E are imho 2,5:1 oversubscribed). In that case if all 12 - 10G Ports are receiving only 48GBit can be sent to other linecards. Imho switching on the linecard it self is not limited.

Be Careful: a stacking link only has a limited bandwidth, so you may have a bottleneck there if you e.g. have 10G lacps arriving on two different stack members. (no wirespeed here anymore)

Means of hardware: a dedicated hardware forwards the packet (fast)
Means of software: the CPU in the switch has to inspect each packet and decide where to forward it.

Handling of routing protocols, traffic to the switch (ssh sessions, snmp aso) is handled in Software/CPU, packet switching is done in hardware.

Very clear, thanks =)