Breakout Mode for the Falcon-40G Card

In This Section:

Introduction to the Breakout Mode

The Check Point Falcon-40G-B acceleration card supports an optical breakout cable (also known as a "fanout", "splitter", or "octopus" cable). You can connect this cable to split a Multimode OM3 or OM4 MPO connector into four LC optical connectors.

The Falcon-40G-B acceleration card supports a breakout configuration of 1x40 GbE to 4x10 GbE. This turns every 40 GbE port into four ports of 10 GbE. These "child interfaces" of 10 GbE are essentially unique individual interfaces, with their own MAC addresses, IP addresses, netmasks, MTU, and so on. You can also use these "child" interfaces to configure a Bond interface, a Bridge interface, and so on.

The Gaia operating system on the Security Appliance shows these interfaces for the ports of each installed Falcon-40G acceleration card:

Breakout mode	Interfaces in Gaia
Disabled for both ports (default)	`eth`<Slot#>`-01` (works at 40 GbE)
	`eth`<Slot#>`-05` (works at 40 GbE)
Enabled for Port #1 only	`eth`<Slot#>`-01` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-02` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-03` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-04` (works at 10 GbE)
	`eth`<Slot#>`-05` (works at 40 GbE)
Enabled for Port #2 only	`eth`<Slot#>`-01` (works at 40 GbE)
	`eth`<Slot#>`-05` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-06` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-07` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-08` (works at 10 GbE)
Enabled for both ports	`eth`<Slot#>`-01` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-02` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-03` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-04` (works at 10 GbE)
	`eth`<Slot#>`-05` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-06` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-07` (works at 10 GbE) `eth`<Slot#>`-08` (works at 10 GbE)

Note - "<Slot#>" denotes the ordinal number of the front-facing I/O slot, which the Falcon-40G acceleration card populates. For example, for the first Falcon-40G acceleration card with disabled breakout mode, Gaia OS would show eth1-01 and eth1-05. For example, for the second Falcon-40G acceleration card with disabled breakout mode, Gaia OS would show eth2-01 and eth2-05.

Example 1 from Gaia Portal - Breakout mode is disabled for both ports (default):

Example 2 from Gaia Portal - Breakout mode is enabled for Port #2 only: