It has been well over a month since I attended the MPLS 2009 conference and participated in the panel on Emerging Technologies and Business Architectural Impact, and it is about time (over-due) that I posted my thoughts.

Foremost, I should say Thank You to Monique Morrow for organizing such a great panel and inviting me to participate.  I’ve known Monique as a colleague and friend for a while now, and whenever we have chance to meet she never fails to impress me.  In the context of this panel, I was dumbfounded at the quality and breadth of the other participants that she secured.  Monique moderated the discussion such that the panel’s large size was a benefit rather than liability.  As a panel we managed to cover multiple topics with decent depth, and were each allowed to illustrate our different perspectives.  I’ve been told by several audience members that it was an excellent panel, and from my (admittedly biased) perspective I must agree.

As for the discussion itself, I very much enjoyed participating.  Considering the quality of the other panelists, I am honored to have been included; each of the other panelists are recognizable for their contributions and role in the industry.  Given my respect for the other panelists, I tried to enter the conversation prepared and did not hold back any of my significant thoughts during the discussion… for better or worse.

Some of my comments may have included points that were controversial.  For instance, one theme that ran through the entire discussion was the complex balance of cost vs. capacity vs. features in network devices.  I challenged comments from Vijay Gill (of Google) and Donn Lee (of Facebook) which argued in favor of very-large dumb switches. ("dumb" is my word choice, but I suspect they would agree)  From their perspectives, as engineers for large web properties, they need to scale out single-tenant environments to support Internet-scale traffic loads and a simple L2 or L3 switch would enable their topology.  But, I argued, they were "weird" in their requirements, which are unique to large web properties.  Service providers and enterprise environments need more features in order to deal with the complexity and changing "customer" requirements they face daily.

After the panel I had the opportunity to chat with Vijay and Donn, and they had an interesting view of the cost / capacity / features debate.  Their comments deserve some focus, so look for a future post on this topic.

Another topic was the relevance of standards, which wasn’t particularly controversial but which caused some interesting comments.  My point was that standards are critical to the industry, but in the same way that fundamental research is critical to science and technology (broadly speaking).  We need to put effort into standards because it brings people together and promotes the state of the art.  But we also need to recognize that functioning interoperable implementations are what matter, regardless of the standards conformance, etc.  In other words, standards bodies should work diligently but not take themselves too seriously in the process.

Regardless, I hope to be included in future panels such as this one (at the MPLS conference and/or elsewhere) and I’m glad to have had the opportunity at MPLS 2009.  I would absolutely recommend that you attend future panels by Monique, at MPLS 2010 or otherwise, whether I’m taking part or not. Though, obviously, it would be better with my opinion included.