[c-nsp] Bridging Across an OC3

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 03:42:34PM -0400, Devon True wrote:
> I have a customer who is looking to bridge their traffic across an OC3. 
> (They want to use the same subnet on both sides of the circuit). It 
> looks like IRB is the method to use, but I am concerned about 
> performance issues. Normally there is very little traffic across the 
> OC3, but in a disaster, they could push 75-100Mbps across it.
> 
> Any recommendations on hardware/software are appreciated!

We have been surprisingly happy using EoMPLS / AToM to bridge Ethernet 
VLANs over MPLS.  Even if it's only two routers, directly connected to 
each other, EoMPLS was less painful than all the other bridging-over-
WAN-lines stuff.  So if you happen to have the correct IOS versions and 
licenses (I'm not exactly sure which versions could be used, I think 12.0S 
and 12.2S "provider" on 7200s have the necessary functions) this could be
a nice approach.

The good thing about anything MPLS based is that it's a highly optimized
and well-maintained code path in IOS, because it's heavily used in large
networks - while all the legacy bridging stuff tends to be in slow code
paths, and grows bugs over time.

gert
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de