Paul, Sorry it took me so long to reply to this. Let me tell you about my experience with Stratacom. First of all I work at a large ISP where I am responsible for most of the network design. Three years ago our backbone was DS-3. We enthusiastically installed the BPX 8620. The future seemed bright for the BPX in the core of a network. I LOVE the BPX and IGX and MGX 8220 (as much as any person can really love an MGX that is) , I think they are great, stable, and well built boxes. We ran happily for two years and since then we've upgraded the backbone to OC-3 and now OC-12. We are now outgrowing the OC-12s. As you probably know, the BPX 8620 can only support OC-12, and even then it's port density isn't that great. So what's a cisco atm network to do? We're happy with the ATM, we own millions of dollars worth of it. It would suck to move from autoroute to pnni, but if we have to we will, so...simple, we try the MGX 8850. The 8850, in my opinion, is the biggest piece of crap cisco has ever made. I regret buying two of them. Whoever shipped these things to customers deserves a punch in the face for every unit they sold. Cisco has the resources to build a ATM switch based on IOS, or BPX SWSW, but instead they use the MGX operating system. Then they ship it to me like it can be put in production, but the software was so bad it should have had a alpha release label on it. It was rushed to market. It currently goes OC-48. When we bought it we had indications from the sales people that it would in just 3 months go faster. That project was cancelled. So here we are, stuck at OC-12 with the BPX.
So what's our next move? Well we will probably end up running an optical network with a lambda of POS IP traffic and a lambda of OC-48 with a sonet mux muxing in 8620 oc-12s until we can migrate our atm services to MPLS IP. If there are less Stratacom jobs it's probably because there are lots of people in a similar situation to ours. I imagine most ISPs our size and bigger and making a migration to a DWDM/POS type of network for lots of reasons including the one I mentioned above. Is WAN switching dead? No way. MPLS is very similar to cell switching even in it's frame mode. Is ATM dead. Maybe. If your a CCNP Wan like me, I would say its time to start working on your CCIP MPLS and get to get involved in optical. Everything moves in cycles. Until the next cycle of frame/cell (lightwave) switched networking comes around I would say to concentrate on other areas. I feel your pain, I have a lot of time invested in ATM, but technology changes, an engineer has to change with it. Mike > -----Original Message----- > From: Paul Jin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 5:56 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: WAN Switching [7:34035] > > > Hey Mike, > > What do you think about the future of the stratacoms? My > friends and I have > been discussing it back and forth. > > Is the demand going to be there for this product in the > future or what? > Even on the new C/S CCIE track, you only get the written portion as an > option for WAN stuff but in the lab, no stratacoms either. > > What do you guys use the Stratacoms for at work? Especially > if you guys are > running this product as a normal consumer/business and not as a telco. > > thanks, > Paul Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=34338&t=34035 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
