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I know that a non-blocking switch is a switch that can manage the sum of the maximum theoretical speeds of all its ports.
However, as the term suggests, "theoretical" maximum speed is just a theory and it rarely happens in real-life conditions.
Given this infrequent scenario, why is there a need for a non-blocking switch??
By being able to handle the sum of the maximum speeds of all ports, a non-blocking switch guarantees that the internal switching logic can never cause a delay in the network traffic.
Suppose two servers (A and B) have a dedicated connection to each other that runs through one or more non-blocking switches. This connection only handles traffic that goes between A and B.
Because all the switches in-between are non-blocking, you have the guarantee that the connection between A and B will never be impacted by the other traffic that the switches handle as well. This can be useful if you need to have a guaranteed throughput or a guaranteed latency on that connection.
However, as the term suggests, "theoretical" maximum speed is just a theory and it rarely happens in real-life conditions.
That depends on your life, I guess.
In my day job, we try to maximize utilization of our switch ports. Why would you pay for a 400G switch and then not use it? Our products support both 25G, dual-25G, and 100G interfaces precisely so that you can use the switch port that matches your requirements most closely. Our next products will support everything from 25G to 400G, again, for the same reason: so you can maximize utilization of your switch ports.
Non-blocking is a quality in switches that tells you that a switch doesn't lose frames unless a destination/egress port reaches its maximum bandwidth. That knowledge provides peace of mind and simplifies network design.
In a blocking switch there's a (sometimes unknown) total bandwidth that you cannot exceed. The bad thing is that it's not very obvious and might be really hard to detect that you're hitting the backplane forwarding limit and losing frames.
While small, 1U switches are all non-blocking today (except for really high-speed ones), larger chassis switches usually have a maximum backplane bandwidth and, more specifically, a limited module-to-module throughput that you need to know about when maxing out your network. Not all vendors properly document those limits - and not all network engineers have them on their radar at all times.
might be really hard to detect that you're hitting the backplane forwarding limit and losing frames. This. Very much. Especially with modular switches/chassis where sum of the nominal bandwitdh of a module's/linecard's "frontend" ports can exceed the capacity of the "backend" ports to the backplane/chassis fabric. Only in-depth understanding of the given platform's architecture and using ports accordingly helps in those cases. So it's RTFM, at least twice.
Oct 4 at 19:56
A very similar situation closer to many people is USB chargers. You can buy a USB charger with say five ports. Each port has a maximum power delivery, and so has the whole charger. And often the charger capacity is less than the sum of the five ports.
It makes financial sense. Because you can connect five devices that sometimes need a lot of power but not all the time. If it is essential to have the max power times five available at all times, you pay your money. But if it is not always needed, then you may get 90% of the value at 60% of the cost.