>Okay, I am going to run the risk of starting a religious war here. But I do
>have to ask, is MPLS really as great as people say?
Great for what purpose? One of the problems is lots of
presentations, certainly the ones I've gotten unmodified from Cisco
training (not engineering), emphasize the forwarding aspects of MPLS,
without much discussion of LSP setup protocols (LDP, RSVP-TE, and
CR-LDP, and I am _not_ going to touch that religious war), or the
relationship of these path setup protocols to IP routing.
MPLS complements IP routing. Neither replaces the other. There
might have been some arguments in that area when (my mind
blanks--they were acquired by Nokia) introduced the first label
switching machines, but the hardware and algorithms have caught up.
There's a huge amount of FUD here, just as there is with respect to
the technically meaningless term "L3 switching".
The main focus on basic MPLS these days is traffic engineering, VPNs,
and the ability to simplify the network with stacked labels. I don't
know anyone whose technical opinion I respect who would argue that
it's significantly faster in the forwarding plane.
Another motivation is GMPLS, which extends use of the MPLS setup
protocols to other sub-IP transmission systems, including optical and
TDM.
I'd hardly argue that Juniper is beating Cisco in this area, since
Cisco introduced RFC 2547 VPNs, which are dominating carrier VPNs.
Nortel is also very aggressive in MPLS, especially the GMPLS
extensions for optical network management.
I await with interest what comes out of the newly chartered IETF
PPVPN working group, to see if some of the alternative VPN strategies
gain traction. 2547 works, but it isn't perfect, especially with its
impact on BGP. A great audience comment at the Atlanta NANOG, with
respect to 2547, was "if this is the answer...it must have been a
pretty stupid question."
Message Posted at:
http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=6158&t=6151
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