Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 9- by Ciaran Roche, Vanco

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 9

	This Month's Issue:
	Delivering the Total Package

The VNO and MPLS: When Is it a Good Match for the Enterprise?

By Ciaran Roche, Vanco

Since its development by a group of engineers at Cisco, the ascent of Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) has been rapid. This has been true in spite the natural inertia of enterprises, which tend to hold on to existing technologies instead of embracing new ones.

MPLS produces a connectionless system, thus imitating a Layer 3 IP solution while maintaining the performance and security guarantees of more standard Layer 2 solutions. This hybrid effect leads to calling MPLS Layer 2.5. With MPLS, traffic is switched and not routed through the core (hence the connectionless aspect) while at the same time establishing Label Switched Paths (LSP) through packet switch tagging to assure high performance level guarantees. Since MPLS is IP-aware and any-to-any connectivity is an intrinsic feature, it's often less complex to deploy. Moves and changes are comparatively straightforward, and the technology is inherently secure.

Obstacles to MPLS
MPLS has been seen for some time as quite hot and trendy in the industry, the “technology to have”. Still, replacing any technology is almost always time-consuming and costly, and not an activity readily undertaken even when the long-term benefits are crystal clear. While it is widely agreed that MPLS offers the multiple service models and traffic management that fits well with global enterprises, conversion from legacy systems is a task enterprises might want to postpone as long as possible.

This reluctance is often supported by the telecoms carrier, which naturally wants the enterprise to stick with the infrastructure the carrier owns. No carrier has infrastructure in every country in the world and instead concentrates on its own strong territories. This becomes increasingly in conflict with enterprises as they look to expand and acquire properties in developing parts of the world such as India, China and Eastern Europe-all attractive due to the lower operational costs available.

However, once an enterprise had decided to use MPLS, the question of creating a network with the right fit can be an enormous hurdle. When it comes to MPLS, it seems that every provider offers a slightly, or even very, different flavor.

In fact, the major question now facing the telecommunications industry regarding MPLS is standardization. Telecom providers deploy incompatible MPLS systems that cannot be easily combined for the benefit of an enterprise. The reasons are often more

MPLS has been seen for some time as quite hot and trendy in the industry, the “technology to have”. Still, replacing any technology is almost always time-consuming and costly, and not an activity readily undertaken even when the long-term benefits are crystal clear.

political than actually technical but, nonetheless, the difficulty is quite real.

Consequently, an enterprise seeking MPLS technology often must choose one provider or another and either choice usually offers only a so-so fit. It's similar to the decision a man might have to make in seeking a pair of pants, but finding one store has sizes that are too large while another store wants to sell him a well-fitting kilt. What is the best choice?

In order for MPLS to be the fully universal technology that enterprises need, it would require full interoperability like the Internet. Unfortunately, the very entities that could push such standardization into reality - the largest, infrastructure-based carriers - are also the players that have the most to lose as their clients would be free to mix and match between suppliers. It's understandable given their investment in their individual networks why they prefer to lock clients into their systems.

MPLS providers rarely agree to work together. In instances where such agreements take place, it usually occurs only because it is pushed by a global carrier working with a far less powerful in-country provider. Even those deals with their relative limited geographic scope can take years to negotiate.

Such a dilemma faced Siemens. Alfons Kuhn, Director, Siemens Communication Network, notes, "The inherent flexibility and cost effectiveness of an MPLS based network is ideally suited to our organization. Yet, restricting ourselves to one infrastructure provider would easily negate these benefits."

Siemens turned to Vanco, a Virtual Network Operation (VNO) and one of a relatively new and growing breed of organizations that owns little or no telecoms infrastructure of its own but leases space capacity from carriers. A VNO can use standard products from the providers in order conduct the technical integration between different MPLS systems. While it is also possible for an enterprise to do this on its own, or even to rely upon an infrastructure-based carrier to conduct integration, the reality is that it can be difficult to make happen.

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