At 01:07 PM 7/18/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Let me fill in what he left out. Yes, the industry is moving towards MPLS over POS. That's not where it is now though. At least not for most interfaces. Right now the industry is chock full of lagacy gear, mostly old fashioned ATM. You think you can just casually reassemble this crap in transit? Let's see it!
Gimme an intel IXA network processor and no problem. ATM is fixed size data, not as tricky as IP decoding. Predicatable bandwidth. Stream all into megadisks, analyze later. You need to tap the MPLS label assignment service (or watch all the egress ports and correlate to endpoints) too to know which ATM chunks went where.
Besides that old fashioned transport diversity, we have the original problem: even if you could do it (maybe in three to five years), what are you going to do with the data you've snarfed? Backhaul it? Shove it into TB cassettes? Better keep a guy on staff to change the tray!!
You don't know about tape robots, or offline indexing, eh?