The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform is designed as a Clos fabric that interconnects each line card directly with each rear-mounted fabric module. All traffic between the line cards is load balanced across all fabric modules providing optimal bandwidth distribution within the chassis. This load-balancing capability provides enhanced system reliability and redundancy. The switch continues to operate even in the event of a loss of a fabric module, albeit at a lower capacity, as the remaining fabric modules continue to provide switching capacity to the line cards. Some of these line cards can connect to 1 or 2 additional fabric modules to provide N+1 or N+2 redundancy.