Switch and Broadcast filtering

[zillah2004]

I read this article in the cisco curriculum, but I did not understand it well :

" Occasionally, a device will malfunction and continually send out broadcast frames, which are copied around the network. This is called a broadcast storm and it can significantly reduce network performance.

A switch that can filter broadcast frames makes a broadcast storm less harmful.

Today, switches are also able to filter according to the network-layer protocol. This blurs the demarcation between switches and routers. A router operates on the network layer using a routing protocol to direct traffic around the network. A switch that implements advanced filtering techniques is usually called a brouter. Brouters filter by looking at network layer information but they do not use a routing protocol ".

Can the switch filter the broadcast ? Yes, it can,,,,as Cisco says :"This filtering is achieved through the implementation of virtual local-area networks or VLANs ".,,,,,Is there any other type of filtering ?

What is the main difference between router and brouter

[spremkumar]

hi

if u would like to control the broadcast and multicast storms you can refer the link for configuring the storm control for both broadcast and multicast.

you can define up the values and shut the port if it exceeds the threshold limit..

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios124/124cr/hif_r/int_s4h.htm#wp1229258

About the difference between a router and a Brouter afaik BROUTER u use in most of the SP network where you got customers in either DSL or Metro ethernet network where you will have the aggregation of the whole network traffic and from where it will be forwarded to upstream.

It depends on the ios code too which is available to serve the purpose for the same..

you got to have something like 7200 or 7300 in place to serve your purpose of brouter.

regds

[ToddWarren]

Also, keep in mind that in a 6K chassis environment certain modules do not support traffic storm suppression. For instance the 6148, 6548, and 6748 all copper gigabit line cards.