Maple Syrup the Ethernet of the Kitchen
For the holidays I tried a new twist on the festive fowl. I found a receipt for apple maple roasted turkey (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/maple-roast-turkey/). It was a hit. Maple syrup is a staple around our household, it sweetens everything possible in the kitchen (from apples to zucchini).
I liken it to the way that Ethernet has transformed networking, a standardized normalized platform that supports all other communications. Today we can have Ethernet transport from the desktop to desktop regardless of how far those desktops are separated (room, building, campus, metro, nationally or internationally.) The same frame is used to transport those upper layers from edge to edge.
Like my turkey recipe, I take notice when a new Ethernet based technology is introduced. The week prior to our holiday Avaya presented a relatively new Ethernet based transport technology to the engineering team based on Shortest Path Bridging (802.1aq). The technology is explained quite well in a virtualization white paper from Avaya (http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/whitepapers/dn4469%20-%20network%20virtual%20using%20spb%20white%20paper.pdf) so there is no need to repeat the techno-babble here. The technology is intended to replace Ethernet transport over MPLS in the wide area and the use of spanning tree in the local areas. The technological equivalent of replacing sugar with maple syrup on our breakfast table.
Over the past decade I have taught about, designed and installed local area, metro area and wide area Ethernet deployments. None have been straight forward, none plug and play. As the size of the deployment has grown, so has the complexity of the technology. Adding multicast only made the deployment more difficult, another set of addressing, protocols and designs.
So when I read, no I have not had the opportunity to deploy it yet, about shortest path bridging I was intrigued about this system. Loop free local topologies, resilient, and multiservice with as the name implies shortest path transit.
But I have seen this all before. In the early 90s a new exciting all-in-one technology was going to revolutionize communications from the desktop to the wide area. It contained the control, data and management planes in one unified architecture. You more experienced engineers might recognize this diagram:
Yes, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) offered the same feature set that I am seeing for SPB. But ATM lacked industry support and provided a small blip on the technology landscape for all its hype. Mostly because ATM needed chip sets that were ultra-expensive and specialized hardware. SPB on the other hand is Ethernet with a reuse of the technologies that have been time proven and readily available as far as hardware and chip sets are concerned.