HP A3100 "burst mode" implications?

[jborg]

Hi all,

We have a metro network where it's a common situation for clients on 100 Mbps ports to talk to services on 1 Gbps ports, and all interconnects are 1 Gbps or more. We see a lot of output errors ("aborts") on client ports, possibly due to micro bursting and buffer drops.

Enabling burst mode ("burst-mode enable" in the CLI) seems to solve this, i.e. there are not longer any visible drops on the client ports. But, the manual says:

"Because the burst function may affect the QoS performance of your switch, you must make sure that you are fully aware of the impacts when enabling the burst function."

I've been unable to find any explanation of what exactly burst mode does, and what these "impacts" may be. Does anyone have any good information on this?

//jb

[JUANTRON]

Burst mode doesn't affect your network, but you can avoid packet drops by enabling this feature. I recommend it if your core interfaces show many packet drops. This feature controls data flows dinamically.