About this Document

Juniper Validated Design (JVD) is a cross-functional collaboration between Juniper solution architects and test teams to develop coherent multidimensional solutions for domain-specific use cases. The JVD team is comprised of technical leaders in the industry with a wealth of experience supporting complex customer use cases. The scenarios selected for validation are based on industry standards to solve critical business needs with practical designs that are fully supported at publication. 

This document provides JVD for implementing Juniper Network’s port fan-out solution. In general, the port fan-out approach is widely used in network designs to achieve cost savings, port flexibility, and a higher density of ports. At the same time, a port fan-out solution usually introduces additional complexity due to the need of provisioning more network devices ‑ a PE-node along with multiple fan-out (FO) nodes. In this document, we introduce a foundational port fan-out reference architecture based on open standards protocols. It includes implementation choices for port fan-out transparency, control plane and class of service (CoS) considerations, which combines traditional benefits of the port-fan out approach and minimizes operation costs associated with extra FO-nodes in the network.

The validations are done using Juniper's ACX7024 Cloud Metro Router as a fan-out device and MX240 (with MPC10E and MPC7) as edge routers. The forwarding ASIC in the ACX7024 router has throughput of 360 Gbps and 300 Mpps. The demonstrated fan-out design patterns and methodology is applicable to other combinations of routers and switches if they possess the required capabilities. With the combination of an ACX7024 router and an MX Series router, we have successfully performed extensive tests for a 100GE port fan-out solution and confirmed that the solution works flawlessly.