C2IG Meeting Minutes August 28, 1997

Attendees: Nathan Freitas, Steve Francis, Elise Meyer, Larry Murdock, and Kevin Schmidt

Unable to Attend: Kevin Barron, Jim Frew, Ben Humphrey, Steven Pope, Vince Sefcik, and Jason Simpson

Action Items from Last Meeting (August 14, 1997)

Kevin wasn't able to contact the Gartner Group yet, due to campus network security incidents.

Elise reported that the preferred way to deal with the equipment purchases was to present a list of what should be ordered to Vince by November 1, and he would work with Purchasing to determine whether he needed to issue an RFQ or go sole source. If we want to do an RFI, we will need to do that well before November 1.

Steve Francis confirmed his posting to the mailing list that there would be no GSR located at UCSB. He now has the information about the fiber ring topology and fiber availability, but he needs to summarize it into a useful document.

ATM Features, Standards, and Requirements

Kevin discussed the important ATM Standards that we should include in our requirements list:

• We need UNI 3.1 because that is the highest level of support for most NICs, and the UNI 4.0 suite is not backwardly compatible.
• We need UNI 4.0 Signaling, ILMI 4.0 and Traffic Management 4.0. UNI 4.0 Signaling allows point-to-multipoint connections, and optionally "leaf initiated joins", both of which are important for multicast traffic. (UNI 3.1 forces the joining station to talk to the BUS.) UNI 4.0 Signaling (?) allows negotiation of all specs.
• We need AAL 1 and AAL 5. (AAL 2 wasn't done by many vendors, and AAL 3/4 are difficult to do.)
• We must have PNNI 1.0 (which is like OSPF) plus the ABR addendum and aggregation mechanisms. PNNI supersedes IISP. PNNI doesn't support all of the UNI 4.0 Signaling (?) features.
• We must do MPOA, which requires LANE 2.0 (LANE 2.0 does QoS).
• The next version of PNNI is MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Swapping) which is a merging of Cisco's "Tag Switching" with IBM's "ARIS." MPLS would supersede MPOA too, but MPLS is not a specification yet.
• We should avoid proprietary solutions unless they fully interoperate with other vendor's equipment and they don't impact the end user.

Elise distributed spreadsheets that detailed the ATM features highlighted in the MEIR book for both ATM Switches and Edge Switches.

In order to better manage Emulated LAN's (VLANs) the group recommends that all of the edge switches be manageable from the same NOC management platform - this may require that all of the edge switches be from the same manufacturer. This could also disallow some groups from just purchasing an ATM interface for an existing switch or router.

Product Research – Research Group Options

Nathan briefly discussed the Superstack II and the LanPlex.

C2IG Schedule

Elise briefly discussed the schedule that had been emailed out. Steve Francis noted that CENIC planned to indicate what their Cisco order would be on September 3, and would make their order shortly after that. It was unknown when the CENIC Fore order was going to occur.

Action Items for Next Meeting: September 11, 1997

Larry suggested that some of the other CalREN sites might be doing or have already done the product research and evaluation that we were beginning, in which case maybe we could benefit from their prior work. It was noted that not all of the campuses were planning to implement an ATM backbone, and UCLA, which will be using ATM, put their backbone in before the ATM standards were even approved. Steve Francis will ask the TPG mailing list if anyone else is doing what we were doing. Another resource that would have been useful is the meeting occuring at UC Davis in September. But unfortunately it is only available to Internet 2 sites.

Nathan took the book Taking ATM to Task. He will go through it then pass it on to Jason. Larry and Steve Francis are next in line.

Kevin Schmidt will submit a question to the Gartner Group.

Elise and Kevin Schmidt will develop a list of ATM standards requirements that could then be asked of potential equipment vendors. Steve Francis requested that the list include why we want each feature.

Vendors were chosen by or assigned to the following people:

• Steve Francis: IBM & Xylan
• Elise: Bay
• Kevin Schmidt: Cisco & NEC
• Kevin Barron: Fore
• Nathan: 3Com
• Unassigned: Cabletron, Larry

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