Forum Discussion
How does the Fabric Cloud Router compare to the Megaport Cloud Router?
Thank you for your question, Castle - it's a good one.
While similar in there dynamic routing capabilities, Fabric Cloud Router provides a differentiated value to customers in a several ways: Fabric Cloud operates on a distributed forwarding plane in market while Megaport operates on a centralized data plane which requires all traffic to come back to a designated cloud router geo location before continuing to its destination. This can lower throughput by adding additional latency to your network. Additionally, Fabric Cloud Router is enabled to support higher bandwidth connections over 10Gbps. Megaport is limited to 10Gbps. And Fabric Cloud Router’s service package options will include those without predetermined bandwidth and # of connection commit levels which provides you with more network scalability to adjust how you move data more efficiently between cloud environments and services.
Thank you for your question, Castle - it's a good one.
While similar in there dynamic routing capabilities, Fabric Cloud Router provides a differentiated value to customers in a several ways: Fabric Cloud operates on a distributed forwarding plane in market while Megaport operates on a centralized data plane which requires all traffic to come back to a designated cloud router geo location before continuing to its destination. This can lower throughput by adding additional latency to your network. Additionally, Fabric Cloud Router is enabled to support higher bandwidth connections over 10Gbps. Megaport is limited to 10Gbps. And Fabric Cloud Router’s service package options will include those without predetermined bandwidth and # of connection commit levels which provides you with more network scalability to adjust how you move data more efficiently between cloud environments and services.
Thanks for your feedback, Tom. If you don’t mind, I have a couple of follow-up questions:
- Since multiple planes are used, does a single FCR instance provide a fully redundant service? In other words, there's no need to deploy two separate FCRs for redundancy—correct?
- However, does this mean that my services (e.g., AWS, Azure, on-premises) need to establish two connections to the FCR to ensure high availability? One connection going into the A plane and a second connection going into the B plane? Any services that is single-homed to the FCR could potentially be impacted if a plane is having issue—correct?
- Lastly (more for confirmation), the FCR does not have any throughput limitations—correct?
Great questions, Sebastien.
- Yes, a single FCR instance supports both A/B data planes in addition to being a distributed forwarding plane as Tom mentioned. This means that when designing a highly-available solution with FCR, you typically only need one instance per Fabric Metro.
- Correct. Adding on to the information above, in order to ensure redundant / highly-available connectivity to a given destination network when using FCR, you will want to make sure that you have virtual connection on both A/B data planes. When creating connections from your FCR, there are indicators that describe whether the connection is on the Primary or Secondary (A or B) data plane -- and in many of our connection creation flows users can select 'Redundant' and create both connections at the same time to ensure that they're ordered correctly. Our Fabric Virtual Connections, including connections with an FCR have a 99.999% availability SLA when configured as Redundant and 99.9% availability SLA if configured single-homed.
- This is correct. FCR does not have any aggregate throughput limitations (Lab Tier excluded) and a single FCR instance is terabit capable. Depending on the tier of FCR deployed, there may be per-connection speed limits that are supported such as our Standard tier supports Virtual Connections up to 10Gbps -- you can still have 20 different 10Gbps Virtual Connections on a Standard Tier FCR. On our higher tiers we support 25Gbps and 50Gbps virtual connections today and FCR is already designed to support any higher speed virtual connections in the future as well.
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