The design comprises a number of unique features. On each board up to 8 physical Ethernet switches can be configured, each with its own MAC learning tables and VLAN space. Each configured switch can allocate any number of switch ports from a set of 8 physical + 247 logical Ethernet ports.
Logical ports corresponds to ETS channels of configurable bandwidth, connecting to other Ethernet switches or physical ports in the Nimbra network. Each Ethernet switch can also be configured in a Transparent mode for completely transparent transport of packets, port-to-port.
With this unprecedented level of flexibility it is possible to form virtual networks for any application, such as QoS multicast transport of IPTV/CATV traffic, distributed office LAN applications, file transfers or live broadcast video, and mix it with native video/audio/telecom services in one and the same Nimbra network.