Patent ID: 7366166

Claim:
A method of switching network data, comprising: receiving a cell; associating the cell with a destination port; selecting an egress link that has been soft configured to be associated with the destination port; switching the cell to the selected egress link; configuring an arbitrary number of egress links, including the selected egress link, to be associated with the destination port; wherein said arbitrary number of egress links comprise a subset of the egress links available on a switch device, each of said arbitrary number of egress links has a corresponding ingress link, each egress link/ingress link pair comprises a bidirectional connection from a fabric access node to the switch device, and each of said arbitrary number of egress links is associated with a switch plane that is independent of the respective switch planes associated with each of the other of said arbitrary number of egress links; whereby the switch device is virtualized to provide to the fabric access node an arbitrary number of switch planes.