A collegue of mine wrote an article some time back entitled "MPLS: Desert
Toping or Floor Wax"
MPLS originally was created to solve the problem of slow, software-based
routers. Hardware-based (aka Layer 3 switches) routers alleviated that
requirement. Since then MPLS is being used for all sorts of different
functions including:
- traffic engineering
- IP-based virtual private networks
- L2 encapsulation within L3 networks
- Reservation of L1/2 resources by L3-based control mechanisms
IMHO, the basic goal of MPLS is to converge the various L1/2-specific
control mechanisms into a single, unified control plane capable of
provisioning and managing a path across a packet-based network
infrastructure. But who knows where we will be in five years.
Irwin
-----Original Message-----
From: David Chandler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 8:07 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Does MPLS really live up to all its hype? [7:6151]
No Way!!!
The Marketing people NEVER exagerate..... :->
MPLS does seem like a solution to a problem that was fixed some time
ago...ie: fast-switching, CEF etc...
DaveC
NRF wrote:
>
> Mr. Berkowitz, please read this post and respond.
>
> 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?
>
> I know many people, on newsgroups and in real-life, champion MPLS as the
> perfect answer to the problems of the core Internet. Faster IP
forwarding,
> traffic engineering, VPN capabilities, etc., it seems to have some
powerful
> features. No doubt, this attitude is sparked by Juniper, which is using
> MPLS as a strategic weapon against Cisco, and since Juniper keeps eating
> Cisco's lunch, it stands to reason that MPLS has something to do with it.
> In fact, many network engineers treat MPLS as nothing less than the holy
> grail.
>
> But I wonder if the hype has begun to outstrip reality.
>
> For example, as a response to the LightReading test, Bill St. Arnaud of
the
> Canadian carrier Canarie states "The MPLS [multiprotocol label switching]
> throughput results confirmed our suspicions that MPLS does not buy you
much
> except a big management headache. True, the throughput is higher, but not
> significantly higher than IP forwarding"
> http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?site=testing&doc_id=3909
>
> And even the idea of higher throughput has been questioned by the mother
of
> all networking, Radia Perlman:
> " Originally [MPLS] was designed to make it possible to build fast
routers,
> but then, using techniques such as [trie searches, parallelism, K-ary
> searches] people built routers fast enough on native IP packets. So now
> MPLS is thought to be mostly a technique for classifying the type of
packet
> for quality of service or for assigning routes for traffic engineering..."
> (Interconnections, 2nd Ed., p. 347-348). And I think we would all agree
> that anything Ms. Perlman says must be given serious weight.
>
> So I must ask, does MPLS really live up to all the hype? Is it really the
> greatest thing since sliced bread? How much of MPLS really is an
> improvement on today's network, and how much of it is just a bunch of
> (probably Juniper) marketing bullshi*? Has any company ever worked for a
> company that evaluated MPLS and then decided not to use it, and if so,
what
> were the reasons?
>
> Thanx for all the non-flame responses
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