Good Morning,

 I work for a company that has a network infrastructure composed of 13 interconnected Dell Powerconnect 5324 switches. Recently we've experienced a couple of issues with faulty NIC's that have brought down the network and have been a complete pain (to say the very least) to locate the malfunctioning device.

I've CCNA so I'm more than aware of storm-control facilities on switches, however, I've never needed to use the facility until now. After a little investigation I discovered on the Dell Powerconnect IOS, the port storm-control enable command to prevent packets from a malfunctioning NIC/cheap switch or hub propagating the network and bringing the network to a grinding halt. My question is this, does anyone use this facility? The facility is configured to disable a port when the port receives a predefined number of packets-per-second... this is something that needs configuring when the facility is enabled against a port. Does anyone have a suggestion as to what would be an adequate number to set this as? The default is zero, but it goes up to 1 million packets per second. Basically, how many packets per second would be considered to have a negative impact on the network and a broadcast/multicast storm?

Thanks for anyone who finds the time to read this. Thank you very much to anyone who responds.

Matt :smileyhappy: