Overview of the P220 Gigabit Switch Family

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:

❒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 hunt groups per switch.

OpenTrunk Technology

OpenTrunk technology translates VLAN-tagged frames from one format to another (including CoS).

The P220 switch is delivered as a plug and play IEEE 802.1D standard bridge, but supports several VLAN tagging schemes. This makes the switch highly interoperable in existing networks because:

❒Any port can be a trunk port.

❒Ports have configurable VLAN tagging on a per-port basis.

❒Ports process a number of popular VLAN tagging schemes, including major vendors’ proprietary schemes (Figure 2-2).

Cajun P550/P220 Switch Operation Guide

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