ZebOS Hardware Integration
•	ZebOS Hardware Integration Architecture
•	Summary of ZebOS Hardware Integration Benefits
•	Comprehensive Forwarding Plane Implementation
•	High Performance and Scalable Frame/Packet Forwarding
•	Advanced Distributed Stacking/Chassis Support
•	Integration of Customer Features and Functions
Videos
The Need for ZebOS Kunihiro Ishiguro

The ZebOS® software utilizes an industry leading scalable, modular and extensible architecture for building routing, switching as well as IP services and application systems, as shown in the following software architecture diagram

Click image to enlarge

Modular and Portable Software Architecture Diagram

The ZebOS Hardware Abstraction Layer isolates all of the hardware platform specific interaction into a small set of well defined function calls for the control plane. The HAL provides a unified interface for the control plane to interact with the forwarding plane for all L2, L3, multicast and MPLS forwarding needs. The function calls above the HAL run unmodified for any switching and routing hardware platform. The result is that customers have the full flexibility to select only the required protocol modules in the most cost and code space effective way.

ZebOS Hardware Integration provides integration and optimization of the ZebOS software with both merchant silicon hardware platform and operating system of choice. Depending on the system application, the appropriate hardware integration and the required options can be selected flexibly. For example, for the enterprise switching and metro Ethernet applications, the available options are shown in the following table. Availability of options may depend on the merchant silicon used. Taking advantage of the feature rich merchant silicon, the hardware integration includes support for hardware based QoS management, rate limiting, traffic metering, and security such as packet filtering/remarking, denial-of-service attack/CPU protection and packet tunneling.