put several lan cards into one "chunk", and expand net bandwidth

[Hanry Zhou]

all these cards can be located in the same segment, thus the network bandwidth will be increased.

Has anybody have such experience, and how I achieve that?

Thanks,

[IT_2007]

you can do this port aggregation. means run multiple cables to switch to Unix host and then install APA product on server. Switch also should be configured with port aggregation.

[spex]

Hi,

What you're talking about doing is called Auto-Port Aggregation (APA). Here's the product brief:

http://www.hp.com/products1/serverconnectivity/adapters/apa_prodbrief.html

PCS

[Patrick Wallek]

Info on Auto Port Aggregation software is available here:

http://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=J4240AA

APA is the way to go.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The product you need is called Auto-port Aggregation (APA) but it's not free. Not only will it bond multiple physical connections into one logical connection but it also will allow the failure of physical links without losing the logical link. APA is not compatible with all ethernet switches so you need to make sure that you have compatible equipment.

[Bill Hassell]

And very important: if your switch has all the same speed links, especially the link to rest of your network, there isn't much use in using APA. The limiting bandwidth is outside your subnet. APA only makes sense whenh you have a much faster backbone such as Gigabit. The data is only going to flow at the maximum rate of the slowest link between your system and the other end.