Patent ID: 8270599

Claim:
A network interface device comprising: at least one physical memory; at least one client port, the at least one client port receiving data blocks from at least one first client computer system, each of the data blocks containing a quantity of bits; at least one processor communicatively coupled to the at least one client port, the processor accessing the at least one physical memory to: temporarily store the data blocks in the at least one physical memory; interact with the at least one physical memory to compress the data blocks to reduce the quantity of bits and produce a first set of compressed data blocks; and interact with the at least one physical memory to encrypt the compressed data blocks to produce encrypted frames; and at least one network port, communicatively coupled to the processor, the at least one network port transmitting the encrypted frames to a communication network; the at least one processor including a primary device to produce the first set of compressed data blocks derived from data from a first client port, and a secondary device communicatively coupled to the primary device to produce a second set of compressed data blocks derived from data from a second client port, the primary device aggregating the first and second compressed data blocks prior to encrypting, the primary device including a first transparent generic frame procedure (“GFP-T”) mapper to map the first set of compressed blocks into transparent generic frames, the secondary device including a second GFP-T mapper to map the second set of compressed blocks into transparent generic frames, the mapping occurring prior to aggregating the first and second compressed data blocks.