Wrong. None of the vendors wants to help you what so ever. What they want to do is to have you spend your money with them by claiming that they want to help you. Cool, I respect that attitude. At least now I know how to deal with you. The glass is half empty.
Very simple. Put a good product in front of me and you wont get this attitude. Tell me that you can do a line-rate filtering when you cant and be bitch-slapped. Should you, as a service provide, not want to be up every second day at 4am because a new super-cool feature that you have deployed broke your entire network, a dose of healthy skeptisism would do wonders to your nerves, your customer service nerves and *gasp* customers not disputing charges for services.
Wouldn't you rather have a reliable, redundant L2 core with isolated failures and fast recovery?
No. I hate complicated words and complicated concepts. It reminds me NASA spending 10M to invent a pen that writes in 0 gravity instead of using a pencil.
You are the guy that posted about IBGP Nailed Routes. I love that idea. I understand your love of L3 and your design is great; however, as a service provider, you can't always rely on IP.
You are absolutely correct. One should not rely on IP for everything. One also probably should not use Starwars Network Management Protocolv2 running over an unprotected network (which uses hubs in public places) to not just read telemetry data but also issue march commands. However, using IP as a transport between two encrypting SNMP gateways to do the same thing would do just fine.
What about Global Ethernet? The NY, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Frankfurt, Moscow, Bankok, Sydney, Hong Kong, London, Cairo, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Toronto, Mexico City, Rio (Can I manage this one?) Internet Exchange?
And see a spectacular cascading failure from NY affecting traffic in Cairo. Brilliant fireworks. I bet New York City's New Year celebration would be nothing compared to the fireworks at the NOC screens. However, should your company offer $500,000 per minute outage insurance policy, I am quite certain that a few of companies I consult for may be interested.
MPLS VPLS over Ethernet Anybody?
Eik.
Use your nailed routes trick in the middle (MPLS side) and L2 peering exchanges in each city. Only problem with this is complexity.
No, the only problem with this is lack of clues on the designer's side.
Do this alone or with few partners and you may be able to pull it off completely L2 without the cost of complexity. Simple like you said.
I highly suggest before one jumps into this, he or she should take a few math and physics classes. It may open even some permanently shut eyes. Alex