Broadcast storm

What’s a broadcast storm?

 A broadcast storm is an abnormally high number of broadcast packets within a short period of time. A broadcast storm can overwhelm switches and endpoints as they struggle to keep up with processing the flood of packets. When this happens, network performance degrades. ...........deas for reducing broadcast storms 

*Storm control and equivalent protocols allow you to rate-limit broadcast packets. If your switch has such a mechanism, turn it on.

 *Ensure IP-directed broadcasts are disabled on your Layer 3 devices. There’s little to no reason why you’d want broadcast packets coming in from the internet going to a private address space. If a storm is originating from the WAN, disabling IP-directed broadcasts will shut it down. 

 *Split up your broadcast domain. Creating a new VLAN and migrating hosts into it will load balance the broadcast traffic to a more acceptable level. Broadcast traffic is necessary and useful, but too much of it eventually leads to a poor network experience. 

 * Check how often ARP tables are emptied. The more frequently they’re emptied, the more often ARP broadcast requests occur. 

 * Sometimes, when switches have hardware failure, their switchports begin to spew out broadcast traffic onto the network. If you have a spare switch of the same or similar model, clone the config of the active switch onto the spare and swap the hardware and cables during a maintenance window. Does the the storm subside? If it does, it was a hardware issue. If not, then you’ve gotta keep digging.