For the last two post, which you can find HERE and HERE, I’ve knocked Cisco around. For those who don’t know me, I should warn that I am an equal opportunity offender. With that in mind, let’s take a look at Brocade’s implementation of TRILL.

As most of you should know, TRILL uses IS-IS on Layer 2 to identify the shortest path between switches, and load balance across those paths. Since this is happening at layer 2, not layer 3, it does away with Spanning Tree, which means more bandwidth and faster fail-over using the same number of ports, fiber paths, cables, and switches.

Of course, despite the fact that we all understand the above to be true, Brocade decided to go their own way and replace IS-IS with FSPF or Fabric Shortest Path First.

If you haven’t done much work in SAN environments, you may not be familiar with FSPF. Brocade created FSPF in 1997 to answer bandwidth concerns in Fiber Channel SANS. It has since become the standard path selection protocol in Fiber Channel fabrics.

With that understanding, let me back up and rephrase. As TRILL utilizing IS-IS was being developed by the IETF, Brocade a member of the IETF, decided to implement their own version of TRILL utilizing FSPF.

Brocade along with Cisco are both offenders. They both claim to be working with the IETF, yet at the same time both have released competitors to TRILL. Are we to believe that Brocade worked to make TRILL the best possible solution at the same time that they were creating a competitor to it? What about Cisco and FabricPath?

Both companies claim that their solution “extends” TRILL with additional features.

Were those “extended” features brought up in meetings when the TRILL standard was being discussed? Did the IETF choose to ignore those suggestions? I doubt it.

Cisco, Brocade, and most like every other vendor sat at the table the same way a poker player does during a game of texas hold ’em. No one showed their cards, but everyone watched the flop, river, and turn cards, to see what they could create with their own hands to drive the other players off the table.

Make no mistake, TRILL did not benefit from Brocade, Cisco, or any other vendor’s presence on the committee. Their involvement was for their own purposes, not the benefit of customers.