nanog mailing list archives
Re: Hezbollah
From: Peter Kline <pkline () cisco com>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 1997 16:13:27 -0400
At 12:52 PM 9/14/97 -0400, Alan Hannan wrote: [whack...]
pps. I'm really not all that in love with ATM. But it does work. If IP could do the things that ATM/FR can, then off we go. My experience and knowledge say that managing a really large, dynamic, and robust network requires more than flexibility than L1 pipes and L3 routers. Something in the middle is needed to smooth out the corners.
It runs at right angles to my nature and my intellect, but in the networking world I've become a huge fan of pragmatism (if it works right now, do it). Building out a national network on a bizarrely short timeline, with no idea of what traffic flows would look like, I found ATM a great way to get things started. If my initial estimates were wrong (and they were), just provision more bandwidth between the two distressed endpoints. And frequently that bandwidth was available in days/weeks as opposed to the months that it was taking to get DS3s to build out a ring. So now I think in terms of the appropriate technology for the job; packet over SONET is a terrific way to connect two L3 devices which currently exchange ~40 Mbps and will probably want to exchange ~150 Mbps (or ~600 Mbps, or ...) within a few months or a year. But when you're trying to bring up a new device in a bandwidth starved city (Seattle a year ago comes to mind) and DS3 ATM is the only thing you can get, ATM does a bang up job, even if it's only 1 PVC to somewhere else. The network equipment market has made an outstanding leap from one choice (some would argue no choice) of tools to do any given job, to multiple tools to do the same job in any number of slightly different ways. Each tool, and each approach, is appropriate to some real-life situation. So given the pants-on-fire growth in this business, and the disjoint ways demand for equipment and bandwidth move v. supply, I'm in love with whatever works right now. -peter
Current thread:
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes), (continued)
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Paul Traina (Sep 14)
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Sean M. Doran (Sep 14)
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Paul Traina (Sep 15)
- Message not available
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Michael Dillon (Sep 12)
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Paul Traina (Sep 12)
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Tony Li (Sep 12)
- Message not available
- Re: ATM (was Re: too many routes) Richard Irving (Sep 15)
- Re: too many routes Dorian R. Kim (Sep 11)
- Re: too many routes Richard Irving (Sep 11)
- Hezbollah Alan Hannan (Sep 14)
- Re: Hezbollah Peter Kline (Sep 14)
- Re: Hezbollah Dorian R. Kim (Sep 14)
- Message not available
- Chanukah [was Re: Hezbollah] Kent W. England (Sep 16)
- Re: too many routes Alex.Bligh (Sep 12)