Hello Juan
The two terms are related of course. The backplane is more of a hardware term. It is the physical circuit board that interconnects the ports on the switch. If you were to open up a switch, it would be the circuit board to which all of the ports are connected. It’s also where other physical components like the power supply, memory, and any processors are connected to. It’s kind of like the motherboard of the switch, but refers mostly to the physical path or backbone through which data packets travel from one port to another. The capacity of the backplane (measured in bps - bits per second) determines the maximum data throughput of the switch.
Switch Fabric, on the other hand, is the mechanism that controls how data travels across the backplane. It’s like the traffic management system of the switch. The switch fabric makes decisions on how to route the packets of data to their correct destination ports. It’s responsible for ensuring efficient and reliable data transmission within the switch. It includes the “intelligence” or the logical capabilities of a switch, which runs on top of the backplane. Does that make sense?
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz