Re: [Idr] Adoption of draft-l3vpn-legacy-rtc-00 as IDR WG document?

[Rob Shakir <[e-mail]>]

On 16 Nov 2011, at 17:19, Pedro Marques wrote:

> -1
> 
> I believe that the "legacy" is now the fact that rt-constraint is
> supported by the most common implementations.
> 
> The proposed procedures for legacy PEs have a level of complexity that
> seems significantly higher than qualifying a new software release.

While this if of course a valid argument, I believe that there are some operational constraints that make this untrue. 

In an ideal world, all deployed PEs would be running current hardware, and with software trains under active development. Unfortunately, this is not always the case - and hence the requirement is more than a software qualification to support RTC. The options here are migration to new hardware platforms, which comes with significant operational costs, or put up with some operational complexity to better utilise existing assets whilst allowing network growth elsewhere, and delay expenditure. 

I realise that such non-technical requirements may fall outside of the consideration of IETF working groups - but I feel strongly that there is some trade-off to be made that sacrifices some absolute correctness to provide technologies that allow operators to meet their network's commercial requirements. 

We should (of course) consider the extent to which such compromises compromise network robustness - but I can't say that I agree that this draft upsets the complexity/benefit balance. I would be interested to hear if you do.

Kind regards,
r.