Hi Scott, your question has an interesting texture to it. It inadvertently points to the potentiality of the double edgedness of the approach:
"...are there pages on their web site that you can recommend that provide some real insight into the uniqueness of their solution...?"
----
I'm witnessing a very interesting phenomenon these days. I'm seeing almost everything, soon possibly very close to everything, being converted from legacy approaches to IP, or becoming IP-enabled. This holds true for even the staunchest of hold outs, like IBM mainframes, where channel extension had previously been done of SNA lines, then combined with ATM and Frame Relay, but now going to channel and front end IP interfaces.
Not only the external interfaces of the main frames, but even the mainframe's logical partitions (LPARs) and internal fabrics are receiving IP addresses. Soon, voice will take this approach. And still, for those applications which require isochronicity, even in the largest IP Clouds, these applications are most often still mapped to ATM virtual circuit flows.
As the capacities of cores increase with DWDM enablement, and as MPLS matures and gains wider spread acceptance, however, we will see an offloading of many of those deterministic flows from ATM to label switching over IP.
What this says is that there is still a window left for circuit switched, and shared ATM networks. The question one must ask, however, is, How long will this window stay open for end user oriented applications?
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
