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
Message Posted at:
http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=6151&t=6151
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