Re: Transport level multihoming

[Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>]

At 11:09 AM 8/8/01, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>Daniel,
>
>If I could avoid the conclusion that we are forced into transport level
>gymnastics, I would be delighted. But remember that the scaling arguments
>are several orders of magnitude worse than in the 802.5 case (potentially
>many millions of entries in a flat routing table, as opposed to a few thousand
>for LAN bridging tables.)

As I said, I remain open to transport level involvement if there's no other 
way. The arguments REALLY do remind me of the 802.5 ones. While I agree we 
are orders of magnitude larger in scope here, we also have significantly 
improved technology to work with. The reliance on "sky is falling" 
arguments to justify standards development which at best will take years is 
what I'm questioning. MPLS was started because of a belief we could never 
build routers that could handle the massive loads, yet routers CAN handle 
the loads. Yes, MPLS has other uses now.

A good test of the justification for undertaking a standardization effort 
would be to look back at the point at which a technology is ready for 
deployment, and see if the initial reasons are still valid.

We will not know for some years whether the decisions we make now are the 
correct ones. I do hope we can find ways to justify ourselves that stand 
the test of time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Senie                                        dts@senie.com
Amaranth Networks Inc.                    http://www.amaranth.com