Solution Benefits
Since the early days of data networking, equipment manufacturers are striving to make bigger, better, denser (in terms of speeds and feeds as well as features), and faster switches and routers. Although these goals are being consistently achieved, fast, dense, and feature rich network equipment presents specific scalability and flexibility challenges. These challenges are more pronounced at, but not limited to, the edges of a network where customer's equipment connects (or attaches) to the provider's equipment. These challenges are best addressed by network design through port fan-out architectures.
Cost Effective
Attachment circuits at the edges of a network are often (maybe even most of the time) running at a fraction of their native or design capacity (both speeds and features). This is because they are dedicated to a specific customer who rarely consumes a port's abilities in their entirety and typically transmits and receives traffic. This is usually considered inefficient because there is excess capacity (speeds and features) that is not being consumed, which leads to higher capital and operating costs.
In an effort to drive higher capacity utilization and reduce costs in the world of compute and storage, virtualization was invented and is now widely deployed. A port fan-out architecture does to network design what virtualization does to compute and storage – drives higher capacity utilization and reduces costs of fast, capable, and expensive edge router ports.
Flexible Port Options
A fan-out design addresses the need to provide slower Ethernet attachment circuits, for example, 1/10/25/40GbE, as well as their sub-rates and multiples, while preserving features and capabilities available to a customer on an edge router's port.
Higher Port Density
There are several significant benefits of a fan-out design for edge routers. The customer density per fast, feature-reach, and expensive port increases from a ratio of 1:1 to N:1, where N ranges from a few ports to hundreds of ports, depending on the type and model of the fan-out device being used. The ratio gets even bigger if we consciously allow oversubscription, which works well for bursty traffic. This increase of customer and service density per edge router port allows network operators to maximize use of their investment in hardware and licenses.
Minimum Provisioning Efforts and Transparency
The fundamental benefit of the proposed solution is the minimal provisioning effort required to maintain connections at fan-out devices during the life cycle of the provided network services. This is possible due to the full transparency and port state synchronization between the customer-facing physical port of the FO-node and the logical interfaces of the PE-device for the Layer 2 (L2) protocols. In other words, connecting a new attached circuit to the fan-out device would look like attaching it directly to the port of the PE-node and requires zero configuration changes to be done at FO-node at the time of connecting a new or swapping existing attached circuits.