[rbridge] WG LC draft-ietf-trill-prob-04.txt

[Steve Dalberg]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rbridge-bounces at postel.org [mailto:rbridge-bounces at postel.org]
On Behalf Of Silvano
> Gai
> Sent: Monday, July 14, 2008 3:25 PM
> To: Donald Eastlake; rbridge at postel.org
> Subject: Re: [rbridge] WG LC draft-ietf-trill-prob-04.txt
> 
> My general comment is that this draft does a lot of unneeded
bad-mouthing of Spanning tree
> and indirectly of IEEE. There are a lot of brilliant folks at IEEE
that have devoted many
> years of their life to improve spanning tree and to make it the only
current deployed protocol
> at layer 2. If spanning tree was as bad as described in this draft it
will not be currently
> deployed.
> 

Concerning "the only current deployed protocol at Layer 2"

This is untrue, as many vendors have proprietary solutions that don't
involve spanning tree.  HP ProCurve has Meshing, and I believe Extreme
also uses some propriety stuff as well.  Cisco has Their some variances
of Spanning tree, and some true alternatives with some of their stacking
features (I'll admit this is very limited, but it isn't spanning tree
either).  Trill is trying to address a problem vendors have been working
on proprietary solutions on for a while.  While I agree that disparaging
IEEE isn't productive, there is merit in pointing out that Spanning Tree
is deficient in many ways and forces people down paths that can be
costly since a tree topology causes lots of aggregation.  Many people
could forestall an upgrade to 10Gig with a Trill solution in a mesh
topology.

Steve