All things related to multicast

[Hugh LaMaster <>]

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Steve Shultz wrote:

> At 12:46 PM -0500 on 3/23/99, Jeremy George wrote:
> 
> 
> >   Are there any plans to meet in Washington at the plenary meeting?

Although I won't be there, I hope that Steve can come back 
with some good information on campus-level issues.

> We should have the NGIX-West up and running multicast. CalREN2-North
> 
> just moved to PIM-SM and MSDP along with Stanford. Maybe there could
> 
> be a discussion on lessons learned. At NASA we have found that the Cat5k
> 
> with CGMP on causes the multicast joins to be excessively long. Maybe 
> someone
> 
> could talk about high bandwidth ethernet frames switches that scale 
> on the campus.

Yes, one discussion point could be campus backbone technologies,
such as Ethernet switches, that have fast, correct IGMP snooping, 

Another such point would be the multicast performance of such
switches.  e.g., for people using Cat5k-style switches as
campus backbones, what happens when lots of multicast gets
forwarded to many ports?  Can the switch forward outgoing 
traffic at full rate on all ports?  Which switch models 
perform well with high-bandwidth multicast?

And another such issue is status on multicast-friendly 
shared-media LAN technology that could be used to replace 
the presently ubiquitous FDDI on Iso-LANs(DMZs) etc.


I think many campuses are finding that now that WAN multicast
technology is falling into place, they now have a lot of
(first/last)-mile problems.  Some of the solutions are much 
more multicast-friendly than others.



--
 Hugh LaMaster, M/S 233-21,    ASCII Email: 

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