>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote,
Disclosures: I'm a Nortel employee working in new router design, and
a Cisco stockholder. That said, some of these points might be a bit
harsh on Cisco.
>agnostic might be too strong a term to lavish upon a company that preaches
>"open standards" at prospective customers (such as isl, pim, cgmp, igrp,
>eigrp,their layer 2 hdlc & the rest-meaning, anything they developed in
>isolation and imposed, or are waiting to impose, upon the rest of the
>ip-vulnerable community).
No question that Cisco will try to establish proprietary methods, but
they are legitimate standards players. The standards-based version
of many of the protocols you cite came after Cisco, or someone else,
first introducted its functionality in some proprietary way:
ISL: Cisco actually introduced a VLAN concept with an interpretation
of IEEE 802.10, but for assorted reasons, some technical and some
political/marketing, that never caught on. 802.1Q was developed
after ISL, and 802.1Q is being enhanced by IEEE to have some
capabilities that are in ISL but not the base standard.
HDLC: At the time Cisco introduced this, PPP wasn't defined yet.
PPP itself represents compromises based on the chip implementations
readily available at the time of its introduction. LAP-B existed
but had much more overhead. Several other vendors had similar
proprietary variants of HDLC, including Codex/Motorola and Timeplex.
PIM: Came out of the research community with Cisco participation.
Never was proprietary, AFAIK.
CGMP: Definitely proprietary, although IEEE is considering things with
some of its functions. CGMP reflects a different design approach
than IGMP snooping on switches
IGRP: The alternative was RIP at the time. Several people said that
Cisco tried to put IGRP into the IETF, but other vendors didn't
want it because Cisco had too much of an advantage, and the
current design thinking was link state.
EIGRP: Definitely a proprietary approach, but DUAL itself was invented
at Stanford Research Institute. EIGRP does reflect some very serious
thinking about enhanced distance vector being superior to link state.
OSPF and ISIS still are evolving.
>while i'm quite certain that they will attempt to
>assimilate any commercially non-trivial communication standard into their
>operating systems, i'm concerned that it's not a legitimate question to ask
>about a single direction they might stumble along for both the backbone and
>the lan, since they will obviously follow the divergent trends in each
>market, no matter the implications for their current technological
>investments (btw: there exists a non-zero chance that the technologies in
>both spaces will converge. in that unlikely event, i'm more than certain
>that cisco won't hesitate in cannibalizing one division to capitalize on
>the other) . .. .
When we are talking about futures, the reality is that we truly don't
know. To say that carrier-scale backbones will be ATM (probably not),
POS, IP over raw DWDM, MPLS over raw DWDM, etc., is not yet a given.
We face challenges such as "is it better to have single 40 Gbps
OC-768 streams or multiple OC-192 over DWDM?" There are many routing
versus switching arguments, and MPLS is a mixture of the two (even
though there's intense religion about LDP, RSVP-TE, and CR-LDP). We
don't know the situations in which photonic switching of lambdas is
enough, versus photonic routing of individual packets. Lots of things
we don't know.
I feel fairly comfortable about the lower speeds in the carrier area,
such as 1 and 10 Gbps. But Cisco, Nortel, and everyone else other
than focused startups have to hedge their bets.
>
>anyway, if you're truly concerned about anticipating their future, please
>understand that it has less to do with their current product set as we all
>understand it and far more to do with how they anticipate they might
>eviscerate their competitors and conquer markets that they have yet to
>redefine. my assumption all along was that they were not willing to play
>the nortel game of consolidating their wan and lan technologies (as alluded
>to in the previous paragraph) but they might yet prove to be the microsloth
>of the data communications space (nota bene: they've already made
>considerable progress in this venture).
>
>
>
>To: "cslx" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>cc: (bcc: Kevin Cullimore)
>Subject: Re: anyone has had any contacts with cisco R&D people?
>
>
>Cisco is agnostic with regards to technology and protocols. Cisco attempts
>to implement almost all viable protocols. That's their philosophy. So
>you'll see them implement solutions for customers who want ATM and
>solutions for customers who want SONET in the backbone.
>
>With that said, if your question is about ATM on a campus network, we heard
>recently that they are removing LAN Emulation (LANE) from the CCIE test, so
>that may say something about their direction, or I could be reading too
>much into that decision.
>
>Priscilla
>
>At 07:24 AM 12/2/00, cslx wrote:
>>anyone has had any contacts with cisco R&D people?
>>I want to know which field cisco want focus on in the next decade.
>>IP over ATM switch at the backbone
>>or IP over sonet at the backbone
>>that means for the man or campus network, which one is cisco's prefer
>choice
>>or has the priority?
>>any1 can foresee the furture of ATM in china, and will it be replaced by
>>using total ip switching over backbone sonet transwmission?
> >I am seriously asking this question.
_________________________________
FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html
Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
