Improving network service performance and reliability via links trunking technologies

With the increase of high-speed network backbones, the performance of server’s network interface gradually becomes a pivotal factor. This study provides a method called Ethernet Links Trunking (ELT) technology for achieving efficient connec-tivity between backbones and servers, which provides higher bandwidth and availability of server network interface. The overview of the ELT technology and the results of performance experiment are presented in this paper. Findings showed that the network bandwidth can be scaled by multiple ELT technologies so that more reliable network connectivity can be guaranteed. Some crucial techniques such as Adapter Load Balancing (ALB) and Adapter Fault Tolerance (AFT) are presented in this paper. Experimental results showed that parallel channels of Fast Ethernet are both necessary and sufficient for supporting the data rates of multiple concurrent file transfers on file server.