Traffic suppression and storm control prevent broadcast storms caused by broadcast, unknown multicast, and unknown unicast packets. However, they use different methods to control traffic:
- In traffic suppression, rate thresholds are configured for three types of incoming packets on interfaces. The system discards the traffic exceeding the threshold and forwards the traffic within the threshold. In this way, the system limits the traffic rate in an acceptable range. In addition, traffic suppression can block outgoing packets on interfaces.
- In storm control, rate thresholds are configured for three types of incoming packets only on interfaces. When the traffic exceeds the threshold, the system rejects the packets of this particular type on the interface or shuts down the interface.