[David Phillips]

Hey Nat,

I think the short simple answer is that Ethernet link aggregation is not quite like ports in a Fibre Channel fabric, where adding more ports equals a “bigger pipe”. Link aggregation allows two NIC ports to share an IP address, but in the case of a file transfer, the network layer chooses one of the ports (usually via round robin) to send data over. If you have a Linux NAS, for instance, with 4x 1Gb ports bonded together, then the server can serve around 400 MB/s to clients via the single IP address, but point-to-point is going to be limited to the speed of NIC: 1Gb/10Gb/40Gb/100Gb.

-David