Description of Software Features

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Port Configuration – You can manually configure the speed, duplex mode, and
flow control used on specific ports, or use auto-negotiation to detect the connection
settings used by the attached device. Use the full-duplex mode on ports whenever
possible to double the throughput of switch connections. Flow control should also be
enabled to control network traffic during periods of congestion and prevent the loss
of packets when port buffer thresholds are exceeded. The switch supports flow
control based on the IEEE 802.3x standard (now incorporated in IEEE 802.3-2002).
Rate Limiting – This feature controls the maximum rate for traffic transmitted or
received on an interface. Rate limiting is configured on interfaces at the edge of a
network to limit traffic into or out of the network. Packets that exceed the acceptable
amount of traffic are dropped.
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.
RSPAN Mirroring – You can configure the switch to mirror traffic from remote
switches over a dedicated VLAN. The traffic mirrored can be analyzed in the same
way you would when mirroring traffic locally on a switch.
Port Trunking – Ports can be combined into an aggregate connection. Trunks can
be manually set up or dynamically configured using 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 32 trunks.
Storm Control – Broadcast, multicast and unknown unicast storm suppression
prevents traffic from overwhelming the network. When enabled on a port, the level of
traffic passing through the port is restricted. If 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.
IP Address Filtering – Access to insecure ports can be controlled using DHCP
Snooping which filters ingress traffic based on static IP addresses and addresses
stored in the DHCP Snooping table. Traffic can also be restricted to specific source
IP addresses or source IP/MAC address pairs based on static entries or entries
stored in the DHCP Snooping table.
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