a management system for telecommunication switch is described . the management system is useful for providing operations , administration and maintenance functions in a terabit switch . the management system is a scalable management system , whereby processing of large amounts of network management traffic from carrier operators and virtual private network customers in a terabit switch is enabled . the management system is efficiently implemented by utilizing surplus processing resources in the network interface cards of the switch . the management system includes a protocol unit residing on a first processor card of the switch for receiving a management request , a first request unit residing on the first processor card for creating a request object in response to the received management request , and a first action unit residing on a first network interface card of the switch for executing the received management request in response to an instruction from the request object .