NETWORK RELAY APPARATUS, CONTROL METHOD THEREOF AND COMPUTER PROGRAM

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a technology for maintaining high reliability in a network relay apparatus, while shortening the time until fault recovery.SOLUTION: A network relay apparatus includes: a MAC address storage for associating a transmission port with a MAC address and storing them; a flooding indication storage for storing an information group that is a combination of a plurality of information items wherein a key item to be used for deleting information from the MAC address storage is corresponding to presence/absence of flooding; a plane number management storage for correspondingly storing identification information for identifying the information group and the key item; a table management part which identifies, as presence of flooding, information which has an element in the key item and to which identification information being used currently is made corresponding, in the information group of the flooding indication storage and identifies as absence of flooding, information which has an element in the key item and to which identification information to be used next is made corresponding; and a frame processor for executing flooding.