The difference between stacking and cascading

Cascade is connected to other hubs through a port on a hub. If you use one hub uplink port to another, and the stack is connected by a hub backplane, it's a chip-level connection, such as a 2 24-port switch stacked like a 48-port switch, The advantage is the problem that does not create a bottleneck.

Stacking (stack) and cascading (uplink) are two ways in which multiple switches or hubs are connected. Their main purpose is to increase the port density. However, they are implemented in a different way. Simply put, a cascade can be accomplished by a pair of twisted wires between the switches of any network device manufacturer, between hubs, or between switches and hubs. The stack is only available between the devices of your own manufacturer, and the device must have stacking capabilities. Cascading requires only a single twisted pair (or other medium), and a stack of specialized stacking modules and stacked cables that may need to be purchased separately. The cascade of switches is theoretically not limited in number (note: The number of hubs cascading is limited, and the requirements for 10M and 100M are different), and the stacking of the devices for each manufacturer indicates the maximum number of stacks.

It can be seen from above that cascading is relatively easy, but stacking this technology has the advantage of cascading unreachable. First, multiple switches are stacked together and logically they belong to the same device. This way, if you want to set up these switches, you can see the other switches on the stack as long as you are connected to any one device. The cascaded devices are logically independent, and if you want to network these devices, you must connect to each device in turn.

Secondly, a number of equipment-level federations create cascading bottlenecks. For example, two hundred gigabit switches cascade through a twisted pair, their cascade bandwidth is hundred megabytes. This allows the computer to communicate between the different switches, only through this hundred gigabit bandwidth. While two of switches are stacked together, stacked cables will provide more than 1G of backplane bandwidth, greatly reducing bottlenecks. The switch now has a

The new technology--port trunking, by which multiple twisted-pair wires can be cascaded between two switches, which multiplies cascade bandwidth.

Cascading also has a stack that is not up to the goal of increasing the connection distance. For example, a computer away from the switch, over the single twisted pair of the longest distance of 100 meters, you can place a switch in the middle, so that the computer connected to this switch. Stacked cables are only a few meters long, so you should consider stacking them.

Stacking and cascading have their own advantages, which are often present in the actual scheme design and can be applied flexibly.

Cascade is connected through a port of a hub with other hubs, and the stack is connected by the backplane of the hub. Although cascading and stacking allow for an expansion of the number of ports, each hub or switch in the cascade is logically still a plurality of network-management devices, and a few stacked hubs or switches are logically a network-management device.