Fault Tolerance
Uses one or more secondary adapters to take over for the primary adapter should the first adapter, its cabling, or the link partner fail. Designed to guarantee server availability to the network.
Link Aggregation
Combines multiple adapters into a single channel to provide greater bandwidth. Bandwidth increase is only available when connecting to multiple destination addresses. ALB mode provides aggregation for transmission only while RLB, SLA, and IEEE 802.3ad dynamic link aggregation modes provide aggregation in both directions. Link aggregation modes require switch support, while ALB and RLB modes can be used with any switch.
Load Balancing
The distribution of the transmission and reception load the among aggregated network adapters. An intelligent adaptive agent in the Intel® ANS driver repeatedly analyzes the traffic flow from the server and distributes the packets based on destination addresses. (In IEEE 802.3ad modes the switch provides load balancing on incoming packets.)