What is storm control?

Q: What is storm control?

A broadcast storm is when we have an excessive amount of broadcast traffic on the network then all devices within the broadcast domain will suffer. The switch has to flood all broadcast frames to interfaces in the same VLAN, hosts within the VLAN might have to process these frames (ARP requests for example). Too much broadcast traffic could be caused by malicious software but also by a malfunctioning NIC. To protect ourselves against this, Cisco switches offer the storm-control feature which automatically disables the switch port to protect against the switch CPU overheating and potentially taking down other devices in the rack . We configure a threshold on interfaces to set a limit to the number of broadcasts, multicast or unknown unicast traffic and an action when the threshold is exceeded. As long as limits have been set and adhered, you shouldn’t get any issues with the port dropping.

A broadcast storm is when we have an excessive amount of broadcast traffic on the network then all devices within the broadcast domain will suffer. The switch has to flood all broadcast frames to interfaces in the same VLAN, hosts within the VLAN might have to process these frames (ARP requests for example).

Too much broadcast traffic could be caused by malicious software but also by a malfunctioning NIC. To protect ourselves against this, Cisco switches offer the storm-control feature which automatically disables the switch port to protect against the switch CPU overheating and potentially taking down other devices in the rack. We configure a threshold on interfaces to set a limit to the number of broadcasts, multicast or unknown unicast traffic and an action when the threshold is exceeded.

As long as limits have been set and adhered, you shouldn’t get any issues with the port dropping.

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