Enterasys X-Pedition 8000/8600 Getting Started Guide 5
Features
Features
This section describes the following X-Pedition features:
• Address-based and flow-based bridging
• Port-based VLANs and protocol-based VLANs
• IP and IPX routing
• Layer-4 (application) switching
• Security
• Quality of Service (QoS)
• Statistics
• Management

Bridging

The X-Pedition provides the following types of wire-speed bridging:
• Address-based bridging – The X-Pedition performs this type of bridging by looking up the
destination address in an L2 lookup table on the line card that receives the bridge packet from
the network. The L2 lookup table indicates the exit port(s) for the bridged packet. If the packet
is addressed to the X-Pedition’s own MAC address, the packet is routed rather than bridged.
• Flow-based bridging – The X-Pedition performs this type of bridging by looking up an entry in
the L2 lookup table containing both the source and destination addresses of the bridge packet.
Your choice of bridging method does not affect X-Pedition performance. However, address-based
bridging is more efficient because it requires fewer table entries while flow-based bridging provides
tighter management and control over bridged traffic.
The X-Pedition ports perform address-based bridging by default but can be configured to perform
flow-based bridging, instead of address-based bridging, on a per-port basis. A port cannot be
configured to perform both types of bridging at the same time.