Just got through to a IT exec what MPLS really means

shodown

I have been working with a client on and off for a while with there voice equipment. Today they lost a site on there shiny new MPLS wan that they purchased.(we supported this change cost went way down) Before they had point to point links coming back to some cisco 7200's. Anyways they lost 2 sites today and there wasn't anything we could do about it as it was a problem in the MPLS cloud and we had to wait for the provider to fix it. When I tried to explain to him that he outsourced his WAN, I saw the light bulb go off in his head. Just a funny experience I had today. There are pro's and con's off all type of technologies. It sometimes just takes time for it to synch into peoples head.

darkerz

MPLS is just a poor term Telco's use to sell you VRF/L3VPN on their side.

shodown

at 1st I didn't like MPLS from the standpoint that you loose a lot of control on your wan. Then when I started to see the benifits calling and getting more bandwidth on the fly if available. You can have a serial connection at one site. Frame at another, and ethernet at another and it all works. VRF's if you need seperation. All in all the PRO's outweigh the cons for me.

down77

This is why you always have a backup connection for your remote sites. A while back I had a hard time talking a client into fail over connectivity since they swore the MPLS would never go down. After a "minor" provider failure that prevented automatic credit card processing for 2 days, they decided to call back and take us up on our offer to help implement a secondary method (DMVPN in this case).

shodown

DMVPN is becoming one of my favorite topics these days. No longer do we have to rely on IPSEC tunnels coming up then not being able to reach all sites because someone forgot to add in new routes, or for you old guys ISDN backup. My only complaint is that DMVPN it not supported on ASA's??????

down77

Not yet you mean! DMVPN is supposed to be on the road map for the latest gen of ASA gear (5512-x, 5515-x, 5525-x, etc) but we shall see if/when that actually happens or not.

I actually work with a lot of companies who have ISDN as backup connectivity for retail stores or branch connectivity. It makes for some interesting traffic engineering anytime you have routing changes.