The MPLS-OPS Archive

[Irwin Lazar <ilazar@mplsrc.com>]

Here's the entry for day 1, live blogging continues on http:// 
www.mplsrc.com/

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The MPLS Resource Center will be providing live coverage of MPLScon  
over the next three days.

For those unable to attend, you can order a CD-ROM containing audio  
recordings of the presentations synchronized with the presentation  
files at http://www.twosense.net/MPLS2006

Day 1 Notes:

Conference quick stats: Over 300 registered attendees, fairly even  
mix of enterprise, service provider, and vendor. This is the sixth  
year of MPLScon

In the opening keynote session, Boeing's Douglas Hill discussed the  
migration of their global WAN from frame/ATM to MPLS. Specific  
challenges they had to address included the need to support multicast  
and multiple QoS levels, separate VPNs within multiple sites, and  
partner interconnectivity. Multicast services were delivered using  
"Draft Rosen" standards. Mr. Hill noted Boeing was able to  
dramatically reduce costs as a result of their adoption of MPLS-based  
VPN services, both from lower service costs as well as simplified  
management. Migration away from a hub & spoke architecture reduced  
network latency and routing hops as well.

Amr Ahmed of Ernst & Young delivered an enterprise MPLS RFI guide,  
highlighting the main areas that should be addressed as one writes an  
RFI for their organization. This presentation is a must-read for  
enterprise network managers writing RFI/RFPs for MPLS services.

Naishen Wang of SIAC provided an overview of the Secure Financial  
Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) and its use of MPLS for service  
delivery. Naishen spent a great deal of time discussing the  
challenges of implementing multicast in an MPLS environment. SFTI  
uses the GRE over L3VPN model (draft-rosen previously discussed) as  
well.
Sprint's Michael Buttrey provided a glimpse of the evolution of MPLS  
services, going beyond basis transport toward application-aware  
services, wireless interconnectivity, multicast support, and  
integration of managed VoIP services. This was the first presentation  
to discuss how IMS could be used to bridge MPLS-based wireline  
services with carrier wireless services.

Tuesday evening ended with the annual "Beer & Pizza Shootout", a  
lively exchange on a controversial topic in the MPLS area. Tuesday's  
discussion was on the topic of "What's After MPLS?" which focused on  
trends in MPLS services, the impact of Internet substitution on MPLS- 
WAN services, Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 VPNs, and the impact of the network  
neutrality debate now going on in the industry and in various  
lawmaking bodies. Panelists included Johna Johnson of Nemertes  
Research, Brian Gottbetter of Global Crossing, Monique Morrow of  
Cisco and the IPSphere Forum, Christophe Masiero of Equant, and Rose  
Klimovich of AT&T. The moderator was Dan Golding of Tier 1 Research.

The discussion started with the basic question "Why do I need MPLS  
VPNs if the Internet is good enough", Johna Johnson summed it up best  
by stating that enterprises want to offload network management,  
design and engineering of their WANs to a service provider, and have  
someone to hold accountable if it doesn't work. With Internet VPN,  
there is no external accountability for meeting service requirements.  
Masiero noted as well security concerns related to Internet VPN,  
threat of DDOS, need for firewalls at each site, and so on. Others  
noted that MPLS-VPNs can be bundled with other value added services  
that aren't available in Internet VPN, such as application  
performance management and support for multicast applications. The L2  
vs. L3 debate centered on advantages of each service. Golding noted  
that perhaps L2 was "betamax", better than L3 but later to market.  
Others noted that L3 services are more widely available, and more  
scalable than L2 due to MAC address concerns in L2 environments  
(which can be mitigated by putting a router between the L2VPN and the  
customer premise equipment). Finally, the discussion moved to network  
neutrality, which Johnson noted was primarily being driven by the  
need to develop financial models for peering relationships. Others  
argued that the best effort model will not support advanced services  
such as video on demand, and as IP services become increasingly  
personalized, network architectures must adapt, and revenue models  
must be developed.

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