Cajun P550 Switch Overview

Figure 1-5.flooding Domain

Virtual Bridging

Virtual Bridging

Function

Virtual Bridging

Function

Virtual Bridging

Function

Function

Frame Classification

Function

Port

Hunt Groups

Hunt groups (also known as link aggregation) aggregate bandwidth from multiple ports so they act as one high-bandwidth switch port. The concept used is borrowed from the world of telephony, where incoming calls to a single phone number are routed to the first available line. Hunt groups allow you to create multi-gigabit pipes to transport traffic through the highest traffic areas of your network.

A hunt group provides:

Inter-operation with other vendor’s equipment (for example, Cisco’s Etherchannel and Sun’s Quad Adapter).

Shared traffic load.

Destination address-based traffic sorting, which keeps packets in the right order.

Fault tolerance. If a port in a group fails, the remaining ports in the group pick up the traffic load.

Support for any number of same-speed connections in a group.

Faster recovery from link failure: If a port in the group fails, the remaining ports can carry the load. Recovery not limited by spanning tree convergence time (convergence time is the time the network takes to resume steady-state forwarding after spanning tree reconfiguration).

Up to ten groups per switch.

1-10

Cajun P550/P220 Switch Operation Guide