" From: [email protected] " " " [] " " Consider a backup server A and backup client B, interconnected via a gigabit switch. " In order to achieve a throughput higher than 1 gigabit, both server A and client B have an EtherChannel configured. " However, there is a problem that prevents me to achieve a bandwidth higher than 1 gigabit. " The physical switch is a layer 3 switch, which is only capable of doing load-balancing based on either layer 3 info (IP) or layer 2 info (Ethernet). In order to break the 1 gigabit barrier, I would have a give the backup server multiple IP addresses (of which each one is guaranteed to be redirected to a different physical port on the switch). " " The problem here is that whenever the backup client sets up multiple TCP connections to the server, it only uses 1 IP address of the server (It performs one DNS query and uses the result for each of the connections to set up). As a result all TCP sessions will have the same destination address, resulting in a maximum bandwidth of 1 gigabit since all traffic will hitting only one physical switch port on the destination side.
look into interface trunking. that's sun's name for aggregating multiple interfaces under a single IP addr. the capability has been in the ethernet spec since day 1 but rarely implemented. ________________________________________________________________________ Andrew Hay the genius nature internet rambler is to see what all have seen [email protected] and think what none thought
