AMX NXA-ENET24 Instruction Manual page 20

Introduction
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 one trunk
with two Gigabit optional module ports.
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 8 MB 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.
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 manually assigned to a specific set of VLANs. This allows the switch to
4 NXA-ENET Software Management Guide