How to prevent a data storm

Over the past 10 years or so I’ve had 4 times when a data storm occurred taking down the entire network. Most of those have been authorized devices. I was sure that my Procurve 2910al had the functionality to automatically shut down the port, that the rogue device was attached to, when a data storm was detected. I have no idea how to prevent it from happening. Although 4 times in 10 years is a pretty high percentage of up-time it’s devastating to the staff when it happens

By “data storm” I assume you mean a network loop? This is handled with the Spanning Tree and Loop Protect features of the switch, which need to be carefully configured. It’s also common to employ multicast and broadcast rate-limiting to further reduce the impact of any misbehaving network adapters and software.

thank you. yes, network loop. i have no training, other than work experience, in network hardware so any help is much appreciated.

How many switches total do you have? I believe that’s a 3COM switch so I’m not super familiar with the interface, but if you can get us an idea of your network layout we can probably get you pointed in the right direction.

I have 6 Procurve 2910al switches.Gigabit backbone.
I have three data rooms.

  1. front of the building. it has 2 network switches that service the front offices. it’s also where our Fiber comes in.
  2. back of the building. it’s where all of my servers live. I have 3 switches that service the back half of the building and 4 Hyper-V host servers. I have all of my servers connected to one switch. The two rooms are linked via Fiber
  3. in our new addition. it has a brand new aruba switch. this is linked to the back server room (#2) with Cat5e.
  4. i have a ruckus WiFi system. ZoneDirector 1200 and 16 WAPs

My servers:
2 - Dell Poweredge T620’s
1 - Dell PowerEdge T610
1 - glorified desktop.