The distributed forwarding card (DFC) for the Catalyst 6000 series delivers high-speed distributed services and forwarding for deployment in data-center backbones and server-farm aggregation. The DFC complements the centralized forwarding of the Catalyst 6000 family Supervisor Engine 2 by distributing the centralized forwarding intelligence down to each DFC-enabled module. This provides localized forwarding and service decisions on each line card and accelerates the forwarding performance of the Catalyst 6500 series to 100 Mpps and more.The key benefits, provided by DFC, are scalable performance for service providers and enterprises, scalable control-plane performance, and distributed intelligent network services. The DFC works in conjunction with the Switch Fabric Module, Supervisor Engine 2 with Multilayer Switch Feature Card (MSFC) 2, and fabric-enabled cards (cards with a connection to the Switch Fabric Module) to provide a framework for distributed Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF)-based forwarding architecture. It is required to run supervisor IOS to support distributed forwarding as it is not supported via Catalyst OS.