re: Mirror Mirror on the Wall (Street), Who's the Fastest Switch of ALL?
Hey Ray, try chillin' a bit. Look into the mirror. If you see a stationary image of some dude who lived through an era spotted by the likes of Mark Rudd and the Apollo Flights, then it's doing its job. If it's rotating on several axes under OSPF or MPLS or IOS instructions (open shortest path first, multi-protocol label switching and Cisco's Internetworking Operating System software, respectively), then it'll probably wear out at some point, maybe before you do. And if it doesn't wear out, it will yield its place in the Sun at some point to solid state devices that do the job a lot faster and more reliably.
That was one of the salient points that I attempted making over in the much maligned SilkRoad thread during a discussion that had nothing to do with SR, like most of the topics that were discussed there at some point. If it's not planar-based, or otherwise embedded in semiconductor-like chip fabric, then it's mechanical, and there is no way to make mechanical elegant in lightspeed situations other than to suggest that it is a momentary expedient that does the job for now, at speeds fast enough to switch bulk, MPLS-like or lambda-based paths. At these granularities, however -- and despite how much I have marveled at their design (specifically, LU's lambda router design) -- in the absence of any need to route individual user-specific payloads at wirespeed over them, they are fine. For now.
And while I view MEMS-enabled and MEMS-supported network elements with a sense of favor for what they are used for "now," the end game is not about MEMS being used in a dominant way, IMO, at least not as components in an array of moving parts. They are too slow and subject to shorter MTBF intervals (mean time between failures) than typical the typical semi, despite the published statements to the contrary. What is needed are photonic chip sets, not rotating mirrors. Mechanical mirror rotation is a form of intermediate-term, albeit, a form or much-needed-at-this-time, expedient (read: "fix"). I'll take a closer look at Calient, later on.
FAC |
