Allied Telesis AT 8000/8POE - Manual (Page 82)

Chapter 6: Port Trunking
82 Section I: Using the Menus Interface
Port Trunking Overview
Port trunking is an economical way for you to increase the bandwidth
between two Ethernet switches. A port trunk is 2 to 8 ports that have been
grouped together to function as one logical path. A port trunk increases
the bandwidth between switches and is useful in situations where a single
physical data link between switches is insufficient to handle the traffic
load.
A port trunk always sends packets from a particular source to a particular
destination over the same link within the trunk. A single link is designated
for flooding broadcasts and packets of unknown destination.
Static Port Trunk
Overview
A static port trunk consists of two to eight ports on the switch that function
as a single virtual link between the switch and another device. A static port
trunk improves performance by distributing the traffic across multiple ports
between the devices and enhances reliability by reducing the reliance on a
single physical link.
A static trunk is easy to configure. You designate the ports on the switch
that are to be in the trunk and the management software on the switch
automatically groups them together.
The example in Figure 20 illustrates a static port trunk of four links
between two AT-8000/8POE Fast Ethernet switches.
Figure 20. Static Port Trunk Example
Network equipment vendors tend to employ different techniques to
implement static trunks. Consequently, a static trunk on one device might
not be compatible with the same feature on a device from a different
manufacturer. For this reason static trunks are typically employed only
between devices from the same vendor. That is not to say that an Allied
Telesis layer 2 managed switch cannot form a static trunk with a device
from another manufacturer; but there is the possibility that the
implementations of static trunking on the two devices might not be
compatible.
Also note that a static trunk does not provide for redundancy or link