CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Why Switches Replaced Bridges

What are three reasons that switches replaced bridges? (Choose three.)

A. Smaller frame buffers increase speed.
B. Forward, filter, or flood frames based in hardware.
C. Multiple simultaneous communications between ports.
D. Larger inspection engine allows for higher throughput.
E. Switches have many ports.

Reveal Answer

Answer: B, C and E.

Switches and bridges in function are basically the same.  They forward traffic based on layer 2 addressing (MAC addresses), relative to the ingress port and the egress port based on the destination address.  If the address is not known, it’s a broadcast or an unregistered multicast, is flooded out all ports.  The primary difference is that all modern switches make forwarding decisions in hardware (on Cisco switches, ASICs (application specific integrated circuits…in other words a purpose built CPU for that one or limited function).   Using hardware based forwarding gives us speed, reduced latency, the appearance (and sometimes actual) concurrent conversations and much higher port density.

 

Related Resources
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Related Course
CCNA-DC – CCNA Data Center Boot Camp

CCNA Data Center Question of the Week Series

• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Active Zone Sets
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Virtual Device Contexts
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: VSAN 10
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Destination VIF Field
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Fibre Channel HBA
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Fabric Extender
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Cisco Nexus 7000
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Cisco Unified Fabric
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: IEEE Protocols
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Layer 3 Switching
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Layer 1 of the OSI Model
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: DSAP Field
• CCNA Data Center Question of the Week: Why Switches Replaced Bridges

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