How Manageable Switch Helps to Deal with Network Choking

By | December 27, 2010

With unmanageable switches and hubs, we cannot identify the problem causes of choking, because there is no option to monitor your network, switch ports and cable issues or any others. In order to identify choking source, we have to perform manual check, i.e, to remove connections of each and every port one by one and to check the network performance. This method is possible only in very small networks with less than 20 to 30 systems. But it is very hard to check which device is causing network choke, in big networks.

But with manageable switch we, can easily log into the switch and can check statistics of each and every port in order to identify the problem causing port in the switch; by using that port information we can trace the device (system or another switch) to which the port is connected to. We can also disable the port without unplugging the network cable.

Manageable switches utilize a feature called IGMP (Internet Gateway Management Protocol)- Snooping to prevent multicast messages from choking the network.

Compared with unmanageable switches, manageable switch helps to identify and prevent network choking effectively.