The BlackDiamond 6808 chassis has ten slots. The two center slots support Management Switch fabric Modules (MSM64i), which perform packet switching between all modules across the 128 Gbps passive backplane and support boot and management operations. The BlackDiamond 6816 chassis has twenty slots - four center slots support MSM64i modules. Each MSM64i has two management processors to run the CLI, SNMP and RMON agents in the real-time operating system. These processors also run routing protocols, such as RIP, OSPF, BGP, DVMRP, and PIM, and the Spanning Tree Protocol. The BlackDiamond 6808 supports full management and redundant, non-blocking switch fabric with two MSM64i modules. Similarly, the BlackDiamond 6816 uses four MSM64i modules to achieve non-blocking performance as well as management and switch fabric redundancy. Although only one MSM64i is required in the BlackDiamond 6808 chassis, two MSM64i modules used in parallel can support load-shared switching, routing and switch management. BlackDiamond 6808 switches configured with two MSM64i modules deliver 128 Gbps of backplane capacity, supporting full non-blocking performance for 64 Gigabit Ethernet or 576 10/100BASE-TX ports. By the same token, while only one MSM64i is required in the BlackDiamond 6816 chassis, up to four MSM64i modules can be used in parallel to support load-shared switching, routing and switch management. BlackDiamond 6816 switches configured with four MSM64i modules deliver 256 Gbps of backplane capacity, fully supporting non-blocking performance for 128 Gigabit Ethernet or 768 10/100BASE-TX ports. Additionally, the BlackDiamond 6816 chassis supports a 96 port 10/100 module, making it possible for the 6816 to handle up to 1, 152 10/100BASE-TX ports. In summary, with two redundant MSM64i in the Black Diamond 6808 chassis, all four processors are used - two processors per MSM - for protocol processing. The BlackDiamond 6816 has the capability to use all eight processors available for protocol processing - again, two per MSM. Each MSM64i has 64 Gbps of switch fabric capacity for a total switching capacity in the 6808 of 128 Gbps, and 256 Gbps in the 6816. In the event that two MSM64i modules are used in the BlackDiamond 6808 chassis, or four MSM64i modules in the BlackDiamond 6816, they will load-share the responsibilities of switch management and backplane switching. Having multiple MSM64i modules in the chassis removes a critical single point of failure. If an MSM64i module fails, another one will continue to manage the chassis and switch traffic across the backplane. To meet the two objectives of wire-speed performance and carrier-class resiliency, the MSM64i module was designed so multiple modules in the BlackDiamond 6808 and 6816 chassis would deliver non-blocking performance as well as fault tolerance and redundancy. With each MSM64i module delivering four channels to each of eight fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet switch modules in the BlackDiamond 6808 chassis, it supports a total of 32 full-duplex, one Gbps channels. As a result, each MSM64i module delivers 64 Gbps of backplane switching. Two MSM64i modules in a chassis deliver a total of 128 Gbps of backplane switching. In the BlackDiamond 6816 chassis each MSM64i module delivers two full duplex one Gbps channels to each of 16 modules, again supporting 32 full-duplex, one Gbps channels resulting in 64 Gbps of backplane switching. Up to four MSM64i modules can be installed to deliver 256 Gbps of backplane switching. The load of backplane switching is evenly shared across the switch fabrics based on algorithms supported in the ExtremeWare software suite that comes with every BlackDiamond chassis switch. With this architecture, the load-sharing MSM64i modules guarantee that the backplane is never oversubscribed by any of the I/O modules. Additionally, because the MSM64i modules are fully load sharing, it means that network operations can never be interrupted by the failure of a single module.