EFW Support

Development => EFW Wishlist => Topic started by: tomakos on Wednesday 25 June 2008, 01:22:55 am



Title: NIC link aggregation 802.3ad (aka: teaming, port trunking, etc.)
Post by: tomakos on Wednesday 25 June 2008, 01:22:55 am
Hello folks,

how about integrating a link aggregation function in Endian? Link aggregation is a very nice way to increase bandwidth and include redundancy. Since 10G-NICs (>800€) and switches (>3500€ for 8-port) are still very expensive, link aggregation is a very good way to increase bandwith bejond 1 Gigabit, by adding multiple of those  1Gigabit-NICs (15€) to a team. 24-port manageable switches who support link aggregation are availiable allready from only 150€. So link aggregation is a solution with a very high value for money, compared to 10GBit solutions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

This would help in the cases that:
1.) The orange and the green networks want to talk to each other in >1GBit/s speed (my case: I am having a 4x1GBit/s green network and would love to move files to the web/FTP-servers in the orange network with 4GBit/s instead of only 1GB/s.
3.) The RED nics are not firewalling towards the internet, but towards another high speed network segment.

It is actually done very easy with a few commands in Linux, since this option is included into the kernel.
http://www.5dollarwhitebox.org/wiki/index.php/Howtos_NIC_Bonding_Debian

greetings
tomakos