What is a non-blocking switch?
It is fairly common to hear about switch being non-blocking. It’s because almost all switches today are non-blocking. But what that means? When I asked people around me on what exactly non-blocking switch means, they were unable to get to the same conclusion.
I was going through a lot of different internet places and vendor documents before I wrote this here, but, do not hesitate to add something in comments if you have different view on the subject.
Line-rate switch means the same as if you would said wire-speed switch. It basically means that this switch has the forwarding capacity that supports concurrently all ports at full port capacity. It should be true for minimum packet sizes to. Non-blocking switch means the same thing. Non-blocking Switch internal bandwidth can handle all the port bandwidths, at the same time, at full capacity. Sometimes for high end switches non-blocking is also refereed to switch architecture ability to significantly reduce head-of-line blocking (HOL blocking).