I was reading the site preparation guide for the Cisco NCS 6000 Series routers and I saw this line:
"The Cisco NCS 6000 Series Routers include the Cisco NCS 6008 Line Card Chassis (LCC) and the Cisco NCS 6000 Fabric Card Chassis (FCC)."
Are those part of the same machine? What's the difference between fabric and line cards?
Best Answer
The NCS6k is designed to operate as both a stand-alone chassis, as well as connect to a separate chassis that holds only switch fabric cards. As a standalone system, the switch fabric still interconnects all the linecards, but the fabric cards are on the "back" of the chassis and have only internal-facing interfaces.
In a multi-chassis system you have a set of "linecard chassis" that all interconnect through a different set of fabric cards to the "fabric chassis".
Essentially, the fabric chassis allows you to build an even larger system than you could with a single chassis of 8 linecards.