This release introduces support for tunneling protocols on the Cisco 10000 Series. In effect, PBR is a way to have policy override routing protocol decisions. In that case one access provider might have customers desiring connections to different ISPs and the routing choice needs to be based on the ISP choice, not the ultimate destination. Due to the fact that it is implemented in the PXF, and thus hardware-switched, packets to which PBR is applied will in most cases be forwarded at wire rate. Exceptions to this are cases in which PBR is applied in conjunction with QoS Policy Maps.
Customers can increase bandwidth in smaller, more cost-effective increments.
In addition to providing incremental bandwidth, bonding multiple DLCIs can add a level of fault tolerance to a customer's dedicated access service, as bonding can be implemented across multiple cards, protecting against the failure of any single card. Load balancing can be supported in several ways. Turbo QoS Turbo QoS is another example of the flexibility and scalability accruing to the PXF architecture on the Cisco 10000 Series. The software-based algorithms in this case provided a means of upgrading processing performance without requiring a hardware change. Specifically, this release supports more efficient handling of QoS policy maps.