re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesThis sort of stuff should not be left to carriers or vendors. Their interests are at odds with each other. One wants proprietary hardware/software and the other wants commonality.
The FCC should adjudicate, and add consumer and national security protection requirements.
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesWith all the talk and action by the carriers in the METRO deployment of Ethernet it seems odd that the vendors would consider the carrier market as dormant. Layer II as well as MPLS needs OA&M features in order to reduce operational expense for carriers and ISP's. Having to dispatch out technicians to two or three possible places along a path is expensive and a poor use of your resources and time. Most vendors approach this issue from a campus point of view, which is they think you just walk over and have a look. This is not the real world of reduced head count and offices that have no human presence. In the carrier world the locations are many times miles apart even in the METRO and this leads to many windshield hours for technicians. Now that customers are making demands for an SLA contract the question is do you risk the pay back or build that into the cost a customer pays for service? Having the tools to quickly identify the source of a failure results in lowered operating cost and reduced cost to the end user.
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesYou highlight a valid concern. However, I think you are under estimating the IETF. As did the ITU, by not to giving them their propers. Their track record speaks for itself. The Internet did not just appear overnight, it was built on their knowledge. Therefore, they obviously are in the best position to know what to do. A dimension politicians cannot begin to imagine.
What do you mean by 'propers' in the context of equipment providers vs. carriers? Given that the IETF is now looking at OAM functionality might that not suggest that they were wrong the first time? Were they perhaps a bit arrogant in their approach, forgetting where their bread is buttered or perhaps underestimating the resoursefulness of the carriers?
In future MPLS RFPs which standard do you think will be asked for, IETF or ITU? If your company is only designing to IETF what are your odds of making the sale? Are they better or worse than if you designed to ITU? Standing in front of a PTT or an RBOC and telling them that they don't need what they say they need is an uncommon route to success.
The article mentions that it is difficult to get carriers to speak with a common voice in standards bodies. This is true. However, if they all say something similar it is naive to ignore them. The age-old complaint of equipment providers is that they don't REALLY know what to build for each carrier (as they all have different requirements). I suggested a solution to this a while ago: let the carriers decide the standards. In sales you are often more successful if you can put yourself in your customer's shoes. If you were a carrier and asked for certain functionality in a standards body and were voted down because there are startups with the same voting power that you have, what would you do? There is always the Golden Rule (He with the Gold Rules) and carriers know this extremely well. Why not let them make the major functionality decisions so everybody (ie: equipment providers) has an even playing field (on standards at least)?
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesThe MEF and ITU are talking about and working toward a standard way of doing OA&M. It has been my experience at the MEF that the vendors listen to the carriers and that the carriers differ very little when it comes to OA&M. They may differ on ways to deliver service and such but that is driven by what they have field deployed and ready to provision. I don't think that vendors who ask are given conflicting information but vendors that shoot in the dark looking for solutions miss the target more times than not.
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesI think its great that operators took this upon themselves and used the ITU. The ITU understands operations much better than the IETF.
The IETFs track record on OAM has been simply to define a few MIBs and move on, with the content of the MIBs driven mostly by a propellerhead view of the world, not an operator view.
In the companies I've worked for, operator RFPs provide much better direction on real OAM needs than any IETF RFP or I-D.
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesComrades, I have to agree with zoinks! in Post 7. There is in fact an OAM Area in the IETF. But if you take a look...
...you can see that most of the work is MIBs, RMON and "other stuff".
The fact is that OAM in a connectionless system is really hard to do, so it's not surprising that the IETF has essentially ignored it for so long. But MPLS changes all that except the IETF doesn't allow anything to be done with MPLS that can't be done with IP - hello!
I think the critical point here is not which standards body is right, but that the IETF left out OAM from the core MPLS protocols that were submitted tot he IESG a few months back.
What kind of message does this send to carriers about the suitability of MPLS as a carrier grade technology?
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesI see lots of people using the word "carriers" in this discussion, but I would advise being careful about thinking that there is consensus in this area among the carriers.
In some cases, we are talking about one particular carrier, its ideas, and the ideas of the friends of the people who work at that carrier.
What does this say about the IETF? Well, it says that one small set of people with ideas that not necessarily applicable to the majority of carriers are not going to get to set the standards for the entire industry.
Also, lurking under some of the OAM proposals, are disagreements with the basic model for MPLS as it came out of standards. And if you put it to them, 95% of the carriers didn't want to see OAM features drive the overall design of MPLS. 5% did want that, but they lost and MPLS ended up being a whole lot more flexable.
Historically, overly complicated OAM models have ended up being implemented by everyone and used by no one anyway.
re: MPLS Gets the Management BluesOn the PWE3 mail list, the advocates for the pure, the good ITU model are some guys from BT. Very intelligent folks. They have a networking model whose perfection and completeness tends to be a conversation-stopper. Reminds one a little of the OSI debacle. Someone asked them, has this ever been put into practice in a real network? And they said, well no, but we don't want to keep on making the same old mistakes.
->Historically, overly complicated OAM models have ended up being implemented by everyone and used by no one anyway.
The FCC should adjudicate, and add consumer and national security protection requirements.
Prediction: Nope, ropa dope under Powell.
November. Nuff said.
-Why