Peter Kline wrote:

Hey Peter, Long time no see (a couple years at least)! I remember now you became a "Golden Handcuff" kid. How are you liking Cisco ? This thread has become a Holy war, I quit responding when some of our "esteemed" colleague's started resorting to "ad homonym" Arguments.( ie. ATM doesn't work 'cause your UGLY! ;{ ) But, for you.... :) The BPX has the capability to understand the advantage of multiple paths, and capitalize on them. Kind of a DEC spanning tree instead of an IEEE. (I just thought I would confuse everyone again ;) Certainly the easiest way to configure this is to simply manually load balance the PVC's based upon expectation, then it looks like: trunk or uni uni /DS3\ uni OC3-OC3-DS3-OC3->OC3 \DS3/ Now manually, this can be done on any vendor combo that interoperates. The downside, it won't be dynamic, and there is no way to ever get a PVC or SVC > 45mbs. You also need to know ahead of time what the utilization will be, and it cannot adjust. So if two SVC's burst at the same time, ooops. With ForeSight, the physical looks the same, except now the DS3's must be Trunks. However, the VC's can now be bundled or grouped, etc. This makes the path that any one connection takes dynamic, selecting one of the DS3 trunks. This is an "on the fly operation". It will adjust according to each VC's need, and each trunks load (with preference for re-using the same trunk if possible). It will also re-route to react to "real-time" requirements/bursts. So, if two vc's burst, they will retrain to different trunk paths, (if needed , of course...) auto-magically. Don't the guys on the Strat side of the shop talk to you guys ? ;) Richard ** "Real-Time" is defined, in this case, as "As soon as it notices, it will change as fast as it can" "DEC spanning tree vs IEEE is for the purpose of ANALOGY only, not a direct,exact,precise,perfect identical comparison, (Those who cannot see the forest for the tree's..., go into management! Just think, you will get to wear a tie everyday, and dress so nice that it will instantly be obvious to you that all the geeks in blue jeans are inferior. You can *then* have the sense of security that all these confusing technical terms seem to be undermining in you....;)"

-peter