The link between the NOC's core switch and the perimeter FortiGate is becoming a bandwidth bottleneck, and the utility also wants the connection to survive the failure of a single cable or switch port without an outage. Two additional physical ports are available on both devices. What should the network team configure to meet both goals?

An aggregate interface bundles two or more physical ports into a single logical interface using a link-aggregation protocol such as LACP, which both combines the member links' bandwidth for higher throughput and provides redundancy, since traffic redistributes across the remaining member links automatically if one physical link fails. That directly satisfies both stated goals: more bandwidth and survivability against a single cable or port failure. A software switch instead merges multiple interfaces into one broadcast domain for internal Layer 2 forwarding between local ports — it does not combine bandwidth toward an upstream device or provide the same kind of failover behavior on an uplink. Creating three separate VLAN subinterfaces, one per physical port, keeps the ports acting as three independent, non-redundant paths rather than a single resilient bundle; traffic on any one VLAN still depends entirely on its own single physical link. A static route only controls which next hop traffic is forwarded toward; manually pointing a route out of each port in turn does not provide automatic failover or combined bandwidth, and requires the routing table to be rebuilt any time a link changes state. When verifying the deployment, confirm LACP negotiation is up on all bundled member links, and test that traffic continues uninterrupted when one member cable is unplugged.