Allied Telesis AT-S62 - Manual (Page 136)

Chapter 8: Static and LACP Port Trunks
136 Section I: Basic Operations
Port Trunk Overview
A port trunk is an economical way for you to increase the bandwidth
between the Ethernet switch and another networking device, such as a
network server, router, workstation, or another Ethernet switch. A port
trunk is a group of ports that have been grouped together to function as
one logical path. A port trunk increases the bandwidth between the switch
and the other network device and is useful in situations where a single
physical link between the devices is insufficient to handle the traffic load.
The AT-8500 Series switch supports two types of port trunks:
ˆ Static trunks
ˆ Link Aggregate Control Protocol (LACP) IEEE 802.3ad trunks
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 simply 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 management software
also gives you control over how the traffic is to be distributed over the
trunk ports, as described in “Load Distribution Methods” on page 144.
The example in Figure 34 illustrates a static port trunk of four links
between two AT-8524M switches.
Figure 34. 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
Telesyn layer 2 managed switch cannot form a static trunk with a device
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AT-8524M Fast Ethernet Switch
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