Alternatives to storm-control on Cat 6509.

Sun Aug 23 02:06:23 UTC 2009

On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, Roland Dobbins wrote:
>> there are two things you care about: storm control and port security (mac 
>> address counting).
>
> Chopping up the layer-2 broadcast domain for a given VLAN into smaller pieces 
> via pVLANs can't hurt, either, as long as the hosts have no need to talk to 
> one another - and it has other benefits, as well.

I understand why hosts need to send broadcasts.  In a close/single 
customer environment, broadcasts could be useful.  I hope most 
future protocol designers now think of using multicast or other
discovery mechanisms besides broadcast.

But in a service provider network (or any managed network), is there any 
reason why a customer needs to hear other customer's broadcasts? In 
practice, are there any useful broadcast messages in a multi-customer 
environment that can't/shouldn't be proxied by the network operator or 
handled other ways.