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MPLS or not ?

Trying to get a good pulse on the MPLS craze.

Trying to see what the benifits are if any.

What are the reasons I should or should not move from Frame to MPLS (Besides cost) ?

Our current frame handles critical production data only, redundant netowrk connectivity and routers at every location. WAN traffic is encrypted with Cisco VPN modules on all routers. No plan to have other applications like VoIP on tehse circuits.

What would MPLS give me that frame will not? is it as reliable or not as reliable as frame ?

Thanks for any feedback that you can give.

MC

Reply to
MC
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Hello, MC! You wrote on Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:14:52 -0500:

M> Trying to get a good pulse on the MPLS craze. M> Trying to see what the benifits are if any.

Any-to-any connectivity, carrier has some visibility to customer traffic - markings - and therefore can treat critical traffic better (or non-critical worse :-), cheaper than FR or ATM.

But you didn't ask about drawbacks.

With best regards, Andrey.

Reply to
Andrey Tarasov

Actually I would like to hear of any drawbacks.

Thanks.

Reply to
MC

Hello, MC! You wrote on Thu, 09 Feb 2006 20:57:55 -0500:

M> Actually I would like to hear of any drawbacks.

One big issue I see so far is redistribution of routing information. If you have few offices connected to the same MPLS carrier with more or less equal links - it doesn't affect you much, but anything more complex... Depends on a carrier you will be limited to more or less prefixes you can inject into MPLS. Some carriers may ask you to use specific IP ranges on CE-PE links. Convergence takes in best case scenario 5 seconds, worst case - 85. Getting second carrier for redundancy may be difficult at best or nearly impossible. Load balancing of incoming traffic for dual-homed sites - same solution as with BGP. QoS for incoming traffic is done on PE routers but most likely you wouldn't get SNMP access to monitor QoS statistics.

With best regards, Andrey.

Reply to
Andrey Tarasov

thanks for the info.

We have many frame relay links to remote plants, critical production traffic and running DECnet and IP. We bundle several frame circuits at the PVC level using MLPPPoFR on Cisco routers. Each site has redundant connectivity back to two core Cisco routers at our main data center and connectivity to a remote hub for site, link and DR recovery. We also encrypt traffic (hardware VPN cards installed). We have very sensitive information over these connections, are in the financial industry so security is a very hot topic these days so we like to be in absolute control over the data and keep all administration and monitoring in house.

With that said, If nay other ideas as to why I should or should not look more into MPLS please let me know. I read a lot but would like to find out from experience with the technolgy.

Thanks much. MC

Reply to
MC

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