All,

We're running an (otherwise excellent) non-Cisco stackable switch at the edge. We're having some stability problems, resulting in individual units crashing. When this happens, it seems to cause a broadcast storm.

Out architecture is:

coreA === coreB
 |          |
 \- switch -/

The problem is that the broadcast storm seems to flood the coreA->coreB link too, causing STP drop-outs and flapping.

Obviously one thing to look at is broadcast storm control on the 6500s. However, from what I can make it it's rather primitive; the rate of broadcast traffic is capped only in 1-second windows and doesn't take account of packet-size? Does anyone have any experience of it? Does it work well.

The second thing I'm a bit confused about is how the flood interrupts STP packets. My understanding was that the box generally prioritised control plane traffic for transmission over data-plane. Is that not the case for STP? In any event, the coreA<->coreB links is 2x10G whereas the core->switch links are only 1G, so it's hard to see how 1G could swamp 20G.

Is it more subtle, and the SP is being overwhelmed by the punt? We run CoPP but obviously that's layer3. I don't have any layer2 MLS rate-limiters enabled, and since they're per-box rather than per-port I doubt they'd help.

Advice appreciated.
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