Installation guide

C HAPTER 1 | Introduction
Description of Software Features
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DESCRIPTION OF SOFTWARE FEATURES
The switch provides a wide range of advanced performance enhancing
features. Flow control eliminates the loss of packets due to bottlenecks
caused by port saturation. Storm suppression prevents broadcast,
multicast, and unknown unicast traffic storms from engulfing the network.
Untagged (port-based) and tagged VLANs provide traffic security and
efficient use of network bandwidth. CoS priority queueing ensures the
minimum delay for moving real-time multimedia data across the network.
While multicast filtering provides support for real-time network
applications.
Some of the management features are briefly described below.
CONFIGURATION
BACKUP AND
RESTORE
You can save the current configuration settings to a file on the
management station (using the web interface) and later download this file
to restore the switch configuration settings.
AUTHENTICATION This switch authenticates management access via a web browser. User
names and passwords can be configured locally Port-based authentication
is also supported via the IEEE 802.1X protocol. This protocol uses
Extensible Authentication Protocol over LANs (EAPOL) to request user
credentials from the 802.1X client, and then uses the EAP between the
switch and the authentication server to verify the client’s right to access
the network via an authentication server (i.e., RADIUS server).
PORT CONFIGURATION You can manually configure the speed and 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 802.3-2005).
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. Traffic that falls within
the rate limit is transmitted, while 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.