Crossbow R400-6 is a six-port InfiniBand router, supporting native routing between multiple InfiniBand subnets at full line rates and very low port-to-port latencies. Single subnets comprising just switches and HCAs have a single subnet manager and thus have a single LID space administrator, a simple topology and limited mechanisms for fault or control isolation. Crossbow enables a single InfiniBand fabric to span many subnets, providing many operational advantages. The ability to scale beyond a single LID space: a concern for very large InfiniBand installations.
The potential to support many different subnet topologies (fat-tree, toroidal, mesh) in a single fabric without resorting to dropping out of InfiniBand to provide connectivity between them.

• Faster subnet manager operation (since the work is distributed across multiple subnet managers): again facilitating scaling.
• Controlled inter-organizational InfiniBand connectivity without sharing management sovereignty or dropping out of InfiniBand fabric (particularly relevant when combined with Longbow wide area InfiniBand connectivity).
• Fault isolation: very large systems need not be dependent on a single subnet's connectivity. Each of R400-6's six InfiniBand ports can belong to different subnets; the R400-6 providing InfiniBand specification-compliant GID-based routing between them.
• Management: Ethernet: full duplex 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet with auto MDI-X.
• Protocol support: IPv4, IPv6, HTTP/HTTPS, SNTP, DNS, ZeroConf and DHCP.
• GUI: web based interactive management.
• User management: single user account.
• HTTP: SSL v2/v3 and TLS with HTTP digest challenge/response password exchange. Configuration: through web GUI or via a text configuration file.
• Firmware: web upgradeable.
• Primary/secondary high-availability flash storage with scrubbing.
• InfiniBand interface: connector: IB QSFP+ 4X, QDR at 32Gbits/second (payload).
• Node type: six-port switch or router.
• Physical layer: InfiniBand architecture v1.2.1.
• Subnet manager agent: integrated InfiniBand architecture v1.2.1.
• GID routing entries: up to 65,536 (unicast) and up to 32,768 (multicast).
• Port-to-port latency: 250ns (small packet store-and-forward).
• Packet routing rate: up to 80 million packets per second per port.
• VLs: 4 data and 1 management.