From what you describe I do think you have many options, including more than just the ones you laid out. When you're under 10km and own your own fiber the possibilities are virtually limitless. First off, you don't want to be running spanning tree across a campus. While I don't think you need to elminate it completely as some in the industry are pressing, doing it at the scale you describe is probably a world of hurt. I would challenge your port cost assumption for "routers". For instance the Arista 7280 could deliver can be had with 48 10GE SFP+ ports with full Internet routing capabilities. If you're used to Cisco or Juniper, it is worth looking further afield these days. I would also challenge that there is one way to do the job. It may be easier to build a couple of networks. Perhaps a router based one to deliver IP services, and a separate "Metro Ethernet" network to deliver L2 VLAN transport. It may sound crazy that buying two boxes is chepaer than one, but it can be depending on the exact scale and port count. Heck, depending on your port count doing passive DWDM to interconnect switches in each office may be cheaper than encapsulating in MPLS. A lot of it also depends on your monitoring requirements, or lack of. In a message written on Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 03:43:26PM +0200, steven brock wrote:
How would you convince your management that MPLS is the best solution for your campus network ? How would you justify the cost or speed difference ?
Well, cost and speed are two prime considerations, but there are other important considerations. Vendors support platforms and features based on the customer base. If you buy a box everyone does MPLS on, and then use it for TRILL, you'll be in a world of hurt. Particularly if you want long, stable life ride with the crowd. Use a platform many others are using for the same job. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/