SMC Networks 16 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX manual Description of Software Features

Description of Software Features 1

Port Mirroring – The switch can unobtrusively mirror traffic from any port to a monitor port. You can then attach a protocol analyzer or RMON probe to this port to perform traffic analysis and verify connection integrity.

Port Trunking – Ports can be combined into an aggregate connection. Trunks can be manually set up or dynamically configured using IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). The additional ports dramatically increase the throughput across any connection, and provide redundancy by taking over the load if a port in the trunk should fail. The switch supports up to four trunks.

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 8K 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 500 KB for frame buffering. This buffer can queue packets awaiting transmission on congested networks.

Spanning Tree Protocol – The switch supports these spanning tree protocols:

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP, IEEE 802.1D) – This protocol adds a level of fault tolerance 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 10% of that required by 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.

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