Port Aggregation for Greater Bandwidth and Availability

Greater bandwidth and availability are required between two switches.

Each switch has multiple 100Mb Ethernet ports available.

Which of the following should a technician implement to help achieve these requirements?

A.

Spanning tree

B.

Clustering

C.

Power management

D.

Port aggregation.

D.

The best option to achieve greater bandwidth and availability between two switches with multiple 100Mb Ethernet ports available is to implement port aggregation, also known as link aggregation or EtherChannel.

Port aggregation combines multiple physical connections between switches into a single logical connection, increasing the bandwidth and providing redundancy in case of a link failure. By combining several 100Mb Ethernet ports, the aggregated link can provide a higher bandwidth, for example, 400Mb or 800Mb, depending on the number of ports combined.

Port aggregation requires support from both switches and must be configured consistently on both ends. The IEEE 802.3ad standard defines Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), a protocol used to dynamically negotiate and manage link aggregation between two switches. LACP helps ensure that the link aggregation configuration is consistent on both sides and that the aggregated link is balanced across the individual physical links.

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a protocol used to prevent loops in a network topology and is not designed to increase bandwidth or availability between switches. Clustering is a technique used to group multiple devices or servers together to provide higher availability or load balancing, but it is not directly related to network switches. Power management is a feature used to reduce power consumption by network devices and is not related to improving bandwidth or availability between switches.