GarrettCom 500-Series - Manual (Page 25)

Magnum 500-Series Switching Hubs Installation and User Guide (08/98)
GARRETT
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4.1 Switching Functionality
The Magnum Model 508 provides switched connectivity at Ethernet wire-speed
among all of its eight 10Mb ports. The Magnum Model 528 and 528F switch inter-
connect eight 10Mb and two 100Mb segments for unified access at wire speed. Each
Magnum 500-Series port is a separate traffic domain, and all ports operate to maximize
bandwidth utilization and network performance. All ports can talk to all other ports in a
Magnum 500, but local traffic on a port will not consume any of the bandwidth on any
other port.
Magnum 500-Series units are plug-and-play devices. There is no software
configuring to be done at installation or for maintenance. The only hardware
configuration settings are user options for UP-LINK on 10Mb port #8, and the Half / Full
duplex mode selection for the 100Mb ports of the Magnum 528 and 528F. The internal
functions of both are described below.
Filtering and Forwarding
Each time a packet arrives on one of the switched ports, the decision is taken to
either filter or to forward the packet. Packets whose source and destination addresses are
on the same port segment will be filtered, constraining them to one port and relieving the
rest of the network from processing them. A packet whose destination address is on
another port segment will be forwarded to the appropriate port, and will not be sent to the
other ports where it is not needed. Traffic needed for maintaining the operation of the
network (such as occasional multi-cast packets) are forwarded to all ports.
The Magnum 500-Series Switching Hubs operate in the store-and-forward
switching mode, which eliminates bad packets and enables peak performance to be
achieved when there is heavy traffic on the network.
Address Learning
All Magnum 500-Series units have large address table capacity of 1.9K node
addresses, suitable for use in large networks They are self-learning, so that as nodes are
added or removed or moved from one segment to another, the 500s automatically keep up
with node locations. To reset the address buffer, cycle power down-and-up.