Description of Software Features
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Broadcast Storm Control – Broadcast suppression prevents broadcast traffic from
overwhelming the network. When enabled on a port, the level of broadcast traffic
passing through the port is restricted. If broadcast traffic rises above a pre-defined
threshold, it will be throttled until the level falls back beneath the threshold.
Static Addresses – A static address can be assigned to a specific interface on this
switch. Static addresses are bound to the assigned interface and will not be moved.
When a static address is seen on another interface, the address will be ignored and
will not be written to the address table. Static addresses can be used to provide
network security by restricting access for a known host to a specific port.
IEEE 802.1D Bridge – The switch supports IEEE 802.1D transparent bridging. The
address table facilitates data switching by learning addresses, and then filtering or
forwarding traffic based on this information. The address table supports up to 16K
addresses.
Store-and-Forward Switching – The switch copies each frame into its memory
before forwarding them to another port. This ensures that all frames are a standard
Ethernet size and have been verified for accuracy with the cyclic redundancy check
(CRC). This prevents bad frames from entering the network and wasting bandwidth.
To avoid dropping frames on congested ports, the switch provides 256 KB for frame
buffering. This buffer can queue packets awaiting transmission on congested
networks.
Spanning Tree Algorithm – The switch supports these spanning tree protocols:
Spanning Tree Protocol (STP, IEEE 802.1D) – This protocol provides loop detection
and recovery by allowing two or more redundant connections to be created between
a pair of LAN segments. When there are multiple physical paths between segments,
this protocol will choose a single path and disable all others to ensure that only one
route exists between any two stations on the network. This prevents the creation of
network loops. However, if the chosen path should fail for any reason, an alternate
path will be activated to maintain the connection.
Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP, IEEE 802.1w) – This protocol reduces the
convergence time for network topology changes to about 3 to 5 seconds, compared
to 30 seconds or more for the older IEEE 802.1D STP standard. It is intended as a
complete replacement for STP, but can still interoperate with switches running the
older standard by automatically reconfiguring ports to STP-compliant mode if they
detect STP protocol messages from attached devices.
Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP, IEEE 802.1s) – This protocol is a direct
extension of RSTP. It can provide an independent spanning tree for different VLANs.
It simplifies network management, provides for even faster convergence than RSTP
by limiting the size of each region, and prevents VLAN members from being
segmented from the rest of the group (as sometimes occurs with IEEE 802.1D STP).
Virtual LANs – The switch supports up to 255 VLANs. A Virtual LAN is a collection
of network nodes that share the same collision domain regardless of their physical
location or connection point in the network. The switch supports tagged VLANs
based on the IEEE 802.1Q standard. Members of VLAN groups can be dynamically