Increased Network Scalability by Router Aware Switches

摘要

Handling of ELS REQ and RSP packets that contain addresses in the payload is shifted to the edge fabric switches connected to the node devices issuing and receiving the ELS REQ packet, the ingress and egress switches. This allows the ELS REQ and RSP packet payload address modification operations to be removed from the tasks handled by the router processor. As this removes a processing burden from the router processors, those router processors are free to handle other normal operations, thus allowing more processor bandwidth to be provided to those other operations, which allows further growth of the network as one limitation has been removed. The need to replicate or provide commands between switches or routers is avoided as there are no redundant paths at that point.

主权项

1. A switch comprising:
a processor; random access memory coupled to said processor; program storage coupled to said processor; and at least two ports coupled to said processor, at least one port for connecting to a node device and at least one port for connecting to a network device, wherein said program storage includes a program which, when executed by said processor, causes said processor to perform the following method steps of:
determining if a received extended link services (ELS) request (REQ) packet contains at least one device address in the packet payload;determining if said received ELS REQ packet has a header source address indicating said received ELS REQ packet is from a translation domain; andchanging any device addresses in the packet payload if said received ELS REQ packet contains at least one device address in the packet payload and if said received ELS REQ packet has a header source address indicating said received ELS REQ packet is from a translation domain, wherein said determining steps and said changing step are performed if the switch is operating as an egress switch for said received ELS REQ packet.