Teaming network connections to increase throughput

Wired connections form the backbone of network infrastructure. When one connection isn’t enough, link aggregation or combining multiple network connections together can boost throughput and network resilience.

A brilliant feature for effective switch management, link aggregation enables you to combine multiple wired connections into one logical link. A logical link means that several Ethernet or SFP+ connections will appear as one single connection to other devices in your network. Thus, it allows for easy setup, configuration and automatic load balancing to distribute traffic across all aggregated links.

You can wire two or more Switches together and bundle up to 8 neighboring Ethernet or SFP / SFP+ ports into one link aggregation group (LAG), thereby increasing throughput.

Benefits of link aggregation include:

  • Additional throughput for your backbone network infrastructure
  • Redundancy in case a cable or port fails, which increases resilience
  • Load balancing of the connections
  • Fast and inexpensive transmission of bulk data
  • Enhanced network capacity without investing in additional hardware, thus reducing cost.

Setting up link aggregation has never been easier

Thanks to the Plasma Cloud’s innovative cloud-assisted approach, the set up will be much quicker and easier than you have ever seen it done before. How so, you ask?

Simplicity is key

When designing the UI aspect of link aggregation, our team had one central question in mind: how to make it as easy as possible for our Plasma users to set up, configure and manage link aggregation on the Plasma Cloud console? Following our principle of “Simplicity is Key”, our team has achieved just that: setup efforts have been minimized to the essential to get you started in no time with cloud-assisted configuration.

Cloud-assisted Configuration

The Plasma Cloud console auto-detects when link aggregation is available, or any wiring changes affecting an existing link aggregation group occur. It will prompt an alert message to inform you. A new LAG is detected when two Switches are wired together through two or more neighboring ports. Once a potential LAG status change has been identified, you can manage it in the console.

Activate link aggregation group by clicking on the alert message. A popup will appear, informing you about the potential changes.

Here you can see all relevant details at a glance, like which devices will be connected via which ports. Simply press “confirm” to activate it and you are done! Bye bye to cumbersome manual tweaking.

When configuring multiple link aggregation groups, each group will be assigned a distinct frame color for easy visual differentiation.

The example above shows three link aggregation groups (LAG 1 – blue frame, LAG 2 – green frame and LAG 3 – magenta frame). You can configure up to 4 LAGs per Switch.

Connection overview

The advanced connected devices overview visualizes all devices wired to your Switch, sparing you the time-consuming work of having to check the switch connections manually.

To get a visual overview of your entire wired network architecture, just click on the “Show in layer 2 topology” hyperlink next to Port status and head over to Plasma Cloud’s Layer 2 topology.

To learn how to configure link aggregation, please read our configuration guide.

Link Aggregation available on all Plasma Cloud Switches

Plasma Cloud’s PoE Switches feature up to 24 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and up to 4 SFP+ ports so they can connect plenty of devices.

Summary

With Link Aggregation it is easy to have multiple physical connections to act as one logical connection. This allows you to harden the network in case a link fails and increase total throughput when all the links are functioning. Thanks to the Plasma Cloud’s innovative cloud-assisted approach, setting up link aggregation will be quick and easy.