FAQ

15. What are the unique qualities that dierentiate the
M4300 from other market alternatives?
Mixed stacking between 1G models and 10G models – using 10G
ports – is an important dierentiator: only high-end series with costly
and complex stacking kits are available in the market as of today. This
brings even more simplicity for edge to core topologies, and greater
performance with spine and leaf stacking topologies.
Nonstop forwarding architecture and hitless failover are key for
high availability in a stack: when the management unit fails, most
competitive “redundant” solutions block the trac across the stack
during the failover. This can take 10, 20, 30 seconds – even longer
sometimes – and clients connected to all other switches in the stack
go totally oine. Distributed uplinks to the core are also down. M4300
oers real high availability instead: Nonstop Forwarding (NSF) enables
the stack to secure forwarding end-user trac on all other switches
when the management unit fails. And when both the management
unit and the backup unit connect to the core using distributed link
aggregation (LACP), there is no possible service interruption while the
backup management unit takes over.
M4300 1G models additional advantages are:
•Dual, redundant modular power supplies for cost-eective power
redundancy
•More PoE budget than most competitive solutions, up to PoE+ full
provisioning
•Full Layer 3 feature set including Policy-based routing and OSPF with
zero licensing charges
M4300 10G models additional advantages are:
•Half-width models with low acoustics for active-active server and
storage connections across two switches in 1U and redundant top-
of-rack
•Hybrid 10G copper and 10G fiber port counts because 10 Gigabit
Ethernet itself is hybrid: many server and storage equipment come
with SFP+ fiber or DAC cables for low latency reasons, while 10G
copper is increasingly more widely available.
•Full Layer 3 feature set including Policy-based routing and OSPF with
zero licensing charges
16. What are the Layer 2/3/4 soware features supported?
•Management: Out-of-band; Web GUI; HTTPs; CLI; Telnet; SSH;
SNMP; MIBs; RSPAN; Radius Users, TACACS+
•Usability Enhancements: Link Dependency (Enable or Disable one
or more ports based on the link state of one or more dierent ports);
Syslog and Packet Captures can be sent to USB storage
•IPv4/IPv6 ACL and QoS, DiServ: Ingress 1 Kbps shaping; Time-
based ACLs; Single Rate Policing
•IPv4/IPv6 Multicast Filtering: IGMPv3 MLDv2 Snooping and
Proxy ASM & SSM; IGMPv1,v2 Querier; Control Packet Flooding
•IPv4/IPv6 Policing and Convergence: Auto-VoIP; Auto-iSCSI;
Policy-based routing (PBR); LLDP-MED
•Spanning Tree: STP, MTP, RSTP; Per VLAN PV(R)STP (CLI only);
BPDU/STRG Root Guard
•Green Ethernet: EEE (802.3az) with future firmware upgrade
•VLANs: Access Ports; Trunk Ports with Native VLAN; Static;
Dynamic; Voice; MAC; GVRP/GMRP; QinQ; Private VLANs
•Trunking, Port Channel: Static or Dynamic LACP Seven (7) L2/L3/
L4 hashing algorithms
•IPv4/IPv6 Authentication Security: Successive Tiering (DOT1X;
MAB; Captive Portal); DHCP Snooping; Dynamic ARP Inspection; IP
Source Guard
•IPv4/IPv6 Static Routing: Port, Subnet, VLAN routing; DHCP
Relay; DHCP Server including Stateful DHCPv6 Server; Multicast
static routes
•IPv4 Dynamic Routing: RIP; VRRP
•IPv4 / IPv6 Dynamic Routing: OSPF, Proxy ARP, PIM-SM
PIM-DM, 6-to-4 tunnels
17. M4300 support SDN and OpenFlow 1.3. What
is supported?
M4300 OpenFlow feature enables the switch to be managed by a
centralized OpenFlow Controller using the OpenFlow protocol.
•Support of a single-table OpenFlow 1.3 data forwarding path
•The OpenFlow feature can be administratively enabled and disabled
at any time
•The administrator can allow the switch to automatically assign an
IP address to the OpenFlow feature or to specifically select which
address should be used
•The administrator can also direct the OpenFlow feature to always
use the service port (out-of-band management port)
•The Controller IP addresses are specified manually through the
switch user interface
•The list of OpenFlow Controllers and the controller connection
options are stored in the Controller Table
•The OpenFlow component in M4300 soware uses this information
to set up and maintain SSL connections with the OpenFlow
Controllers
•M4300 implements a subset of the OpenFlow 1.0.0 protocol and a
subset of the OpenFlow 1.3
•It also implements enhancements to the OpenFlow protocol
to optimize it for the Data Center environment and to make it
compatible with Open vSwitch (OVS 2.3.0)