I
NTRODUCTION
1-5
Port Trunking – Ports can be combined into an aggregate connection.
Trunks can be manually set up or dynamically configured using IEEE
802.3-2002 (formerly 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 12 trunks.
Storm Control – Broadcast, multicast and unknown unicast storm
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. T his 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
0.75 MB for frame buffering. This buffer can queue packets awaiting
transmission on congested networks.