Switching

Hi,

We currently have two EX-3300 switches that are located in the same cabinet (cabinet A). We recently got a new cabinet, cabinet B, at the same data center, however, it is about 30 meters away from Cabinet A / our existing network infrastructure. So we are planning to purchase another EX-3300 and install it in cabinet B (we will have 6 web server to start, traffic is currently less than 1 Mbps per server).

I was thinking of connecting the new switch to one of the existing EX-3300 using SFP ports, however, that requires us to buy SFP transceiver which is a bit costly.

The other option that I know of is to just get Cat6 cable and connected the switches using a regular port but then I can only get 1 Gbps and I will face bottleneck if two servers decided to upload big files from cabinet B to servers on cabinets A. 

Can I group two or more ports and connect them to other switch to increase the bandwidth? If yes, what's the option called in JUNOS?

Thanks for your help on this.

you are looking for Link Aggregation (LAG), probably with LACP.

check this http://kb.juniper.net/InfoCenter/index?page=content&id=KB10927&actp=RSS

cheers 

chris

Thanks.

ok, LAG is what I need. Thanks for the info. How LAG is implemented if I want to get two switches for the new cabinet in order to have redundancy?

So:

SW1 and SW2 are in cabinet A

SW3 and SW4 are in cabinet B (As I mentioned 30 meters away and SFP is not an option)

Can I do the following?

SW1 ----------------------- SW2

  |                                        |

  |LAG                                 |LAG

  |                                        |

SW3 ----------------------- SW4

Thanks.

A more elegant solution would be to use Virtual Chassis so your 4 switches  run as one logical unit.

SW1 <= 2x 0.5m DAC => SW2

   ^                                           ^

   ||                                           ||

2x SFP10G-SR          2x SFP10G-SR

   ||                                          ||

   v                                          v

SW3 <= 2x 0.5m DAC => SW4

Thanks. At the end, we just decided to go with Virtual Chassis...