MPLS configs.. Networks section needs stepping up a little

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TrX

TrX

TrX

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Getting bored of reading about home routers ;)

MPLS:
Who's using it?
for what?
Running on what?
Did it solve your issues? / what were you alternatives in solving this problem and are you happy you went with MPLS.

Should make interesting (if not incredibly geeky) reading.

Cheers guys.
//TrX
 
We use it. about 10 temp sites linked with adsl managed mpls routers and 3 leased lines at 3 main sites. We have an internet breakout in london and it all works very nicely. No really big issues to report other than slow internet speeds due to only having a tiny outbreak between so many sites. QOS works nicely to keep out citrix traffic resonably fast. Bit late to go into much detail!
 
Zap said:
We use it. about 10 temp sites linked with adsl managed mpls routers and 3 leased lines at 3 main sites. We have an internet breakout in london and it all works very nicely. No really big issues to report other than slow internet speeds due to only having a tiny outbreak between so many sites. QOS works nicely to keep out citrix traffic resonably fast. Bit late to go into much detail!
Click to expand...

Know the feeling, I'm about to hit some decent alcohol :P
Cheers for the info, always interesting to know of other deployments.
//TrX
 
Our company uses an MPLS network connecting approximately 700 sites over ADSL into our core servers in a London hosting centre before pushing them out through an Internet pipe.

In fact, I'm using one said connection from home at the moment :p What more do you want to know?
 
Who's using it?

Anyone who realises the advantage of having a guaranteed, managed end to end connection with one to many different sites within a business. Whether they be local, regional or international

for what?

MPLS is a carrier mechanism and can support many different frame types, it is typically used to create scalable, private, secure networks for the transfer of latency sensitive data such as voice, video and interactive applications such as citrix.

Running on what?

Being a carrier method you can hop on the back of an MPLS network using pretty much any access technology, ADSL, SDSL, Ethernet, Leased Line, ISDN etc

End to end connectivity is pretty transparent to the customer.


Did it solve your issues? / what were you alternatives in solving this problem and are you happy you went with MPLS.


We have recently put it forward for one of our customers and works brilliantly, it can be a lengthy learning process getting you head around the idea of how it all comes together but isn't overly complicated. It has been proven time and again to be a highly effective method of communication for modern NG Networks.

A close alternative to MPLS is traditionally WAN connectivity combined with any to any meshed VPN's but in this scenario you don't get QoS guarantees end to end.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching
 
Yes, I part designed and ran a substancial part of the installation of our new MPLS core. We're using 10Gbit foundry kit for our core, with juniper m series boxes for edge routing and peering.

Glad we did it? Well it varies, MPLS is marketing in some ways, there is nothing you can do with it which you couldn't do with other means. The foundry kit hasn't been as stable as we'd hoped (we've had two software crashes in 6 months - two too many). The learning curve for support is steeper and provisioning requires more networking ability than before. We had to do it from a business point of view but it's been a tremendous upheaval for not a huge gain so far.

What runs on it, well everything will in the end...
 
Curiosityx said:
Who's using it?

Anyone who realises the advantage of having a guaranteed, managed end to end connection with one to many different sites within a business. Whether they be local, regional or international

for what?

MPLS is a carrier mechanism and can support many different frame types, it is typically used to create scalable, private, secure networks for the transfer of latency sensitive data such as voice, video and interactive applications such as citrix.

Running on what?

Being a carrier method you can hop on the back of an MPLS network using pretty much any access technology, ADSL, SDSL, Ethernet, Leased Line, ISDN etc

End to end connectivity is pretty transparent to the customer.


Did it solve your issues? / what were you alternatives in solving this problem and are you happy you went with MPLS.


We have recently put it forward for one of our customers and works brilliantly, it can be a lengthy learning process getting you head around the idea of how it all comes together but isn't overly complicated. It has been proven time and again to be a highly effective method of communication for modern NG Networks.

A close alternative to MPLS is traditionally WAN connectivity combined with any to any meshed VPN's but in this scenario you don't get QoS guarantees end to end.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching
Click to expand...

I think you missed my point, i'm well aware what it is/how it is used, I was just bored and wanted to hear from people here advanced in networking enough to be involved with it's running, and just out of interest see what size deployments / what vendor hw is being used.
Should have explained myself better, but i'm sure you're post will help many confused people reading this thread :)

//TrX
 
Pretty much every major ISP, carrier has an MPLS core. It's not something that end users really get involved with or need to know about as it's very rarely rolled out to the CE (Customer Edge).

Not sure what advice you want really? Personally, I love it but then I've worked with MPLS for years. It's not especially easy to learn in the first place but once you know what's going on it tends to be easier to acomplish tasks.

Oh, and we use Cisco CRS at the core with GSR's and some 65xx and 76xx at the edge. We have some Juniper ERX's for DSL aggregation as well.
 
ci_newman said:
Our company uses an MPLS network connecting approximately 700 sites over ADSL into our core servers in a London hosting centre before pushing them out through an Internet pipe.

In fact, I'm using one said connection from home at the moment :p What more do you want to know?
Click to expand...

Are you sure you use ADSL over MPLS. Seems a terribly inefficent way of connecting 700 sites together.
 
We have many business customers, many have over a thousand sites, we *kind of* run DSL over MPLS, by simply tagging all the customer routes and importing them into the customer VRF, but the actual true MPLS side of things lives in the core, we mainly use it to create MPLS based VPNs.
 
V-Spec said:
We have many business customers, many have over a thousand sites, we *kind of* run DSL over MPLS, by simply tagging all the customer routes and importing them into the customer VRF, but the actual true MPLS side of things lives in the core, we mainly use it to create MPLS based VPNs.
Click to expand...

Exactly, was just about to explain this before I saw your post...

It's extremely common to bring DSL connections into an MPLS/VPN (Usually by spawning the vi into a VRF on the LNS) but I've never seen anyone actually label-switch traffic accross a DSL line. I suspect this is what the guy above meant.
 
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