Before going down this road, I tend to wonder what drives people this direction. Exactly what is it about poorly scaling, flat networks that turn people on? Last I checked, IP did a pretty decent job of providing a robust means of interconnection between remote sites. To me, its LANE all over again, ie lets take a scalable, robust, intelligent technology and try and bridge with it. As far as building MANs with Spanning Tree as your control protocol, I might suggest that it will give you a real headache from a scaling and provisioning standpoint. You might want to find someone who worked at Yipes to give you some ideas.
As far as building MPLS based bridging networks I would suggest that in many cases, the technology is pretty fresh at this point. The ppvpn group in the ietf and the vendor community (same thing?) are still considering a number of candidate solutions. However, at this point you should be able to find vendors capable of providing point to point topologies with various degrees of scaling properties. As well, I have heard that Riverstone may have a point to multipoint (ie capable of replicating one packet across a series of point to point LSP's) solution, but I have not researched it. In the future, a true VPLS solution should shake out that provides multi vendor compatible, 802.1d like bridging (ie mac learning with some type of listen/learn/forward STP like loop prevention). Again though, I tend to ask myself, is this really what we want to do with our nifty IP networks. I will say that I am fully behind replacing legacy frame/atm vpn networks with IP/MPLS networks in order to reduce the number of networks supported by a single provider. There are definite efficiencies to be gained here. Most access gear at this point supports some type of MPLS however. What type of gear are you using currently that makes it prohibitively expensive to upgrade at this point? At 08:12 PM 7/21/2002 +0000, bbfaye wrote: >we are handling a case of a MAN project now. >We plan to use mpls-l2 vpn to connect the business subscribers.That means we >have to place some mpls-enabled machines on the access nodes(expensive...). >Another choice is using vlan.And the users' vlan are trunked to the >aggressive >nodes.I think it's not so good to do this,but not so sure about the >disadvantage. >Does anyone have experience or suggestion about using vlan and l2-mpls vpn in >the man? >thanks a lot. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=49430&t=49346 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
