Traffic Priority - SMC Networks EtherPower II 1000 User Manual

easily organized to reflect departmental groups (such as Marketing
or R&D) or usage groups (such as e-mail or video conferencing).
VLANs provide greater network efficiency by reducing broadcast
traffic, but also allow you to make network changes without
having to update IP addresses or IP subnets. VLANs inherently
provide a high level of network security, since traffic must pass
through a router or a Layer 3 switch to reach a different VLAN.
Usually VLANs are configured within IEEE 802.1Q VLAN-enabled
switches in the network and computers are assigned to a VLAN ID
based on the switch port number. The EtherPower II 1000 card
overcomes this limitation by allowing up to 16 VLAN IDs to be
configured directly within the network card. Using this feature, a
network server can share its resources with up to 16 VLANs when
connected to a switch port configured with overlapping VLANs,
significantly reducing the latency between clients and the server.
Note: The VLAN IDs configured within the card must match those
in the IEEE 802.1Q-compliant switches throughout the
network.

Traffic Priority

The EtherPower II 1000 network card supports the IEEE 802.1p
Quality of Service standard. Each VLAN is assigned a priority level
in the VLAN ID table. By defining priority levels in the network
card, it allows the card to work with other network devices to
deliver higher priority packets first.
Note that the IEEE 802.1p standard must be supported by the
other devices in the network. Refer to the documentation of your
network devices for configuration options on handling frames with
priority tags.
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