I think I don't fully understand what the advantages are of MPLS.
I mean I've been reading the white-papers and such, and I see it brings
some features to the table, but when are we going to use them?
Routing speed:
* MPLS can make forwarding decisions faster. When they made this in
the 1990's I'm sure that was a big deal, but I'm doubting whether
there is really measurably better latency on modern hardware. Is there?
Traffic Engineering:
* It can do redundancy, but it seems to rely on the routing protocol
(eg OSPF) to know which paths are up. I don't understand what that
buys us.
* It can do load sharing on unequal paths. Admittedly that's very
hard to do with L3 routing protocols, and that would have been
extremely useful at one point in time. But how often does that
happen now that we're in a world of gigabit and 10gigabit connections?
L2 tunneling
* It can transport L2 traffic over an L3 network. It does it with
less overhead (8 bytes) than any other method I can think of. I
don't really see a downside to this.
So are people running MPLS just to get VPLS tunnels, or do you find that
the other tools in the MPLS toolbox matter in today's world?
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