Allied Telesis AT-S62 - Manual (Page 121)

AT-S62 Menus Interface User’s Guide
Section I: Basic Operations 121
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:
❑ Static trunks
❑ 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 130.
The example in Figure 32 illustrates a static port trunk of four links
between two AT-8524M switches.
Figure 32 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
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AT-8524M Fast Ethernet Switch
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AT-8524M Fast Ethernet Switch