Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Ethernet Switching question

Think of it as the part of the switch that ties the ports together. When you leave one switch and move to another, you're operating on a different backplane.

But the better way to phrase my initial comment is to say, latency within one switch will be the tiniest bit better than the latency between two switches.

Also the backplane throughput is usually higher than any individual port. So you can have multiple conversations all at full speed in one switch, but if multiple devices on one switch are trying to talk to multiple devices on another, they'll all have to go through the bottle neck of the connection between them. (This usually isn't an issue until multiple servers are involved.)