Dell Products Inc.

Force10 Networks, Inc.

Purushothaman Nandakumaran

Ravikumar Sivasankar

Joyas Joseph

Janardhanan P Narasimhan

Sanjeev Agrawal

William Zengli Yu

A system and method of failure detection in rings includes a switch including a control unit, one or more first ports coupled to the control unit and configured to couple the switch to a ring of switches in a first direction, and one or more second ports coupled to the control unit and configured to couple the switch to the ring of switches in a second direction opposite the first direction. The control unit is configured to detect a failure in the ring of switches in the second direction, transmit a request message in the first direction using one of the one or more first ports, receive a response message on one of the one or more first ports, extract reachability data from the response message, and determine one or more first switches in the ring of switches that are reachable in the first direction based on information associated with the reachability data.

System and method for failure detection in rings

A first switch forms first and second LAGs and a main LAG comprising the first and second LAGs as sub-LAGs. Forming the first and second LAGs comprises receiving LACP data units which indicate that the first switch is connected to second and third switches through first and second pluralities of ports, and forming the first LAG of the first plurality of ports and the second LAG of the second plurality of ports. The second and third switches share a control plane. In forming the first and second LAGs, LACP data units are received from the second and third switches and include unique identifiers of the second and third switches respectively. Forming the main LAG comprises receiving one or more LACP data units which indicate that the first and second plurality of ports are to be part of the main LAG, and forming the main LAG based on such LACP data units. Other features are also provided.

Systems and methods for forming and using a group of link aggregation groups to reduce traffic on interconnect links

A virtual chassis includes two or more physical chassis and operates as a single, logical device. Each of the two or more physical chassis include two route processor modules (RPM) and each RPM is assigned a first and a second role within the virtual chassis. The first role is a physical chassis level role and the second role is a virtual chassis level role. The RPMs operate in coordination such that the failure of any one of the RPMs results in one or more other RPMs taking over the first and second roles of the failed RPM.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Purushothaman Nandakumaran