Kingston Technology Kingston Fast EtheRx KNS3250/R - Manual (Page 9)

Kingston Technology Company KNS3250/R User’s Guide - Rev. A00
4 Design Features
Design Features
VLAN
VLAN is short for Virtual Local Area Network, and is generally dened as
a broadcast domain. It can be viewed as a group of end nodes which can
communicate with each other even though they may be located on different
physical network segments.
The Fast EtheRx switch provides a simple solution to protect your network against
broadcast storming by creating segments based on Layer 2 Ethernet information.
As a result, each group of stations connected to a seperate segmented port form
an isolated Broadcast Domain. In a switched network environment, a broadcast
packet or an unknown destination MAC address packet will broadcast to ALL
ports, which can decrease the entire network system performance dramatically. By
grouping ports into VLANs, broadcast packets will only be sent to the ports within
the same VLAN without effecting the trafc of the ports outside of the VLAN.
Broadcast sharing ports can be used to connect servers and other common services,
such as Internet access, that are used by all the stations connected to the different
segmented ports.
Typically users are grouped according to similar characteristics such as a common
business function or a common protocol. A single switch may have several
independent VLANs within it.
Link Trunking
Link trunking is basically a method of treating multiple physical links as a
single logical link. By grouping ports into a trunk, you can increase the available
bandwidth between switches or servers. Multiple lower speed links can be grouped
into a single higher speed link. For example, four full-duplex 100Mbps link, such
as ports 1 through 4, can be grouped as a single 800Mbps link as Trunk 1.
Switching Function
The Fast EtheRx Switch is basically designed to bridge Standard 10BASE-T
Ethernet networks to 100BASE-TX Fast Ethernet networks and to segment
10Mbps or 100Mbps network segments.
Auto-Negotiation
Auto-Negotiation provides the means of automatically establishing a link by
detecting the link capabilities of the connected device on the network to select the
best operational mode available (i.e. 100BASE-TX/10BASE-T selection, half- /
full-duplex mode operation, etc.)