Advancing the Protocol and Morin Drafts

["DUBOSE, KENNETH S (KEN), ATTOPS" <[e-mail]>]

Opposed.

I am opposed to this approach as I feel it does nothing to move MVPN
technology forward.  I see this approach as clearly favoring a lateral
shift (PIM to BGP for join/prunes) and also not addressing key multicast
capabilities used by our customers such as BSR, which would still need
to be handled solely by PIM.  Major carriers such as ourselves who have
4+ years of significant experience with MVPN, large global deployments
and tens of thousands of customer connections cannot support a new
standard which is not backed up by any meaningful production network
experience.

In addition, the draft-morin-l3vpn-mvpn-considerations-03 does not
address Pim BiDir while support of this protocol is critical and must be
included out of the gate in any MVPN consideration draft. Secondly, as
Chris Chase, an AT&T Fellow and one of the industry's leading MPLS and
BGP experts has stated we are concerned about the significant investment
in additional Route Reflector infrastructure that would be needed to
process all the additional messaging that would occur when carrying PIM
join/prune information in BGP - and the additional BGP processing on the
edge of the network.

I would hope that any new approach to MVPN would have the  following key
attributes:

1) Does the approach support all current multicast features and
capabilities in use by MVPN customers as well as address new features
and capabilities that are driving customers - and carriers - to deploy
multicast across their different networks.  Having supported large
global multicast customers in the financial, manufacturing, media, and
government areas since the mid to late 90s over L2 networks and also
having worked with at least 90% of our large global customers using MVPN
over MPLS networks, I am seeing vastly increased demand for many-to-many
multicast applications which is driving the need for Pim BiDir support.

2) Does the approach increase the efficiency and scalability of the
carrier's MPLS and MVPN infrastructure to allow the most cost-efficient
deployments in support of our customer base. The draft being discussed
here would appear to increase the cost and complexity of our MVPN
network by requiring a significant increase in our Route Reflector
infrastructure as well as increased processing due to BGP/PIM
translations on the edge of the network. 

Ken DuBose
Distinguished Technology Consultant
AT&T Network Design & Consulting

------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------
This email starts a 3 week call for input, to expire October 23, 2008,  
for the following steps:

1.) To accept draft-morin-l3vpn-mvpn-considerations-03 as a working
group document;  and

2.) To turn this document into a requirements draft, with mandatory to
implement features for an interoperable implementation. The authors
have indicated that they are willing to do this.

Our intention is, if this approach is accepted, to then begin WG last
call to submit to the IESG for publication:

draft-ietf-l3vpn-2547bis-mcast
draft-ietf-l3vpn-2547bis-mcast-bgp

We expect that these two documents will be submitted more or less as is
(i.e., certainly with any new bug fixes or other necessary corrections  
and
improvements, but without specific mandatory to implement feature
description in those drafts).

Please respond to the list with your recommendations for these two
courses of action.

Regards
Marshall & Danny