GSR16/320-SFC

GSR16/320-SFC is a switch fabric or control board for Cisco routing equipment: cisco 12000 Switch Fabric Card GSR16/320-SFC Cisco 12416 320 Gbps GSR Switch Fabric Spare.

This is the brain of the chassis, and that makes redundancy the question worth settling. The control processor runs the routing protocols, holds the configuration and programmes the forwarding hardware. On an unprotected chassis its failure takes the whole node down, not one card’s worth of traffic. On a chassis with two, a failure costs a switchover rather than an outage, and how graceful that switchover is depends on the software release as much as the hardware. If this node carries anything that matters, two is the baseline rather than an upgrade.

The fabric is also the component that sets the real ceiling on a modular chassis. Slot count tells you how many cards fit; fabric capacity tells you how much they can actually move between them. A chassis can be full of capable cards and still be fabric-limited, and on some platforms the fabric is supplied as a matched set rather than a single board, so a half-populated fabric is not a working one.

Three questions worth answering before any router purchase, whatever the model. What the throughput requirement actually is with your feature set enabled, rather than the datasheet figure measured without it. Whether the features you need are licensed as well as present, since on most platforms security and performance are separate entitlements. And how many slots or ports you will need in three years, because adding capacity is cheap and replacing a chassis is not.

Confirm the chassis, the software release and what is already fitted before ordering, because control processors are tightly tied to all three and a mismatched pair will refuse to form a redundant set. Tell us whether this is a spare, an upgrade or a second unit for redundancy and we will make sure it matches what is in the chassis.

Green Code Technologies is a supplier of Cisco, and we supply Huawei and Juniper networking alongside HPE, Dell, Samsung, Netgear, Ubiquiti and Asus. We would rather tell you a part is no longer supported, or that we need to check it, than take an order for something that will not do what you need.