QoS fundamentals

Use the information in this section to help you understand Quality of Service (QoS).

This section describes a range of features that you can use on the switch to manage traffic flowing through your network. You can configure your network to prioritize specific types of traffic to ensure that the traffic receives the appropriate QoS level. For those cases where traffic levels are so high that congestion occurs despite management, the switch provides additional congestions handling features that are described in this section.

QoS refers to the ability to control network flows either by prioritizing traffic or by guaranteeing performance levels. QoS does not refer to a specifically achieved service quality. To provide QoS, you can use some combination of the switch‘s traffic management tools to help deliver provisioned network QoS. It is up to the network administrator to accurately analyze a given situation and select the proper tool(s) for the task.