From: STAR::DUFFELL "11-Jul-1997 0716 -0400" 11-JUL-1997 07:18:17.10 To: @DISTLIST:OPENVMS.DIS CC: DUFFELL Subj: ATM Year 97 Trip Report OVERVIEW I attended ATM Year 97 held in San Jose, California from June 23-27. It's the fifth annual ATM Year conference (my first) and "the world's largest and most authorative event on ATM". The purpose for my attendance was to learn more about the ever changing ATM concepts and standards, to see what other companies are implementing and to see how ATM is being deployed. The conference offered a choice of 16 full-day tutorials on the first two days followed by three days of conference sessions grouped into seven tracks. The seven tracks were: ATM Strategic Issues, ATM Customers and Applications, ATM Products, ATM Public Services, ATM & the Internet, Future ATM Technologies, and ATM Standards. ARRIVAL: Well what can I say, it was a Hyatt but it looked like a Motel 6. A woman at the counter was complaining about her luggage being swiped and the elevator was being 'remodeled' (the walls were only 2x4s). However, the room wasn't so bad and the amazing thing is that each room was equipped with the following: 150Mhz computer, 32Mg RAM, Floppy, CDROM 17" monitor, Speakers HP All-in One Office Jet with faxing, printing and copying capabilities Internet Access with a T-1 connection Welcome to Silicon Valley! Goodnight. DAY 1: I had signed up for a tutorial on comparing ATM products and players. This tutorial was presented by Edwin Meir who owns his own network consulting firm and product test center. Approximately 150 people attended the session. Although this tutorial did not get into great detail about specific products it did give you a good overview of the different ATM products available and his opinion based on his experience. The first advice he gave was that a customer should purchase all their ATM equipment and software from the same vendor (Hmmm... this is not what the latest Data Communications cover story indicates). According to Edwin, the ATM standards are so complex and new that you are bound to get into interoperability problems if you mix equipment. He went on to say that a lot of money is being spent for ATM backbone switches, that generally speaking ATM is not making it to the desktop, and there is definitely not much acceptance for the 25 Mbs adapter. Most NICs support LANE V1.0, and Classical IP but not many support token ring and as of 6 months ago none supported a native ATM API. The leaders in the industry for NICs are Fore, Interphase, Newbridge, Sun and SMC (we were lumped in with Others). The leaders for backbone switches are Fore, Newbridge, Cascade, and GDC. He made a negative comment concerning Digital's VNswitch and never mentioned the Gigaswitch/ATM. At the end of the day, someone asked him why he hadn't mentioned Digital's Gigaswitch/ATM product. He quickly gave some statistics and then said "in his opinion Digital has not been pursuing ATM aggressively". Not a positive way to end my day but all in all it was informative. Couldn't help but feel that Digital, like me, was no longer in it's prime! DAY 2: Another all day tutorial. This time it was a technical tutorial on ATM inter- networking. The tutorial was well attended and presented by Ross Callon from Cascade and Joel Halpern from Newbridge. As indicated this was a very technical tutorial covering LANE, Classical IP, NHRP, MPOA, PNNI and MPLS. I found the morning session interesting since it covered LANE and CLassical IP. Although some of it was review, it did provide insight into the flow of packets and an overview of LANE V2.0. However, by the later part of the afternoon, feeling bogged down by the details of the MPOA packet formats, I left and attended another tutorial. This one was titled "A strategic overview of ATM and broadband Networks" given by the conference chairman, John McQuillan. I walked in when he was presenting his predictions about the future (next 3-5 years). He thought that ATM would make it in the WAN but that Gigabit Ethernet would be predominant in the LAN. He also indicated that Gigabit Fibre Channel would replace SCSI for high-end server-storage networks. Unfortunately I only heard the last hour of this presentation but I do have a hard copy of the slides if anyone is interested. From 3:30 to 9:00 that evening, 3COM had 6 buses taking ATM conference attendees to the 3COM facility in Santa Clara to tour MOAT (Mother Of All Tests). After the tutorial, I decided to take the tour. As I walked off the bus I was greeted by characters dressed up in medieval costumes directing me to the 'moat'. The center courtyard was adorned with tables of various types of wonderful food and a wide selection of beer and wine...oh why did I have to feel nauseous! Every 20 minutes tours were given of their test lab. What a display of equipment. There were 600 ATM ports, 1,700 Switched/Fast Ethernet ports, 120 Token Ring ports, 4 Frame Relay connections, 10 T1 connections, and more, totalling approximately 5 million dollars worth of equipment. All this to test ATM and reveal the problems that are unique to large enterprise networks. Their goal is "to eliminate these problems by generating, tracking, and solving them in the laboratory instead of attempting to analyze them as they occur in the field". 3COM pulled out all stops to impress its clients with this extravaganza. The company is obviously well stocked with young aggressive go-getters bent on capturing the market. Did you know that Candlestick Park is now called 3COM Park? DAY 3: The morning sessions were devoted to keynote speakers. Daniel Smith, the CEO from Cascade talked about the "New Public Network" and how he saw ATM at the core and Frame Relay and IP at the edge. The CEO from Fore, talked about both the Public and Private network where he saw ATM at the core for both of these.He also put up some figures about the Campus Backbone Market which indicated that ATM brought in more revenue in 1996 than Fast Ethernet, or FDDI. In addition, 35% of the installed base was ATM, 43% Shared FDDI, 14% Switched FDDI and 8% Fast Ethernet. Next was a Senior VP from Cisco, Edward Kozel. CISCO focused in on the internet and how fast it was growing. Tag switching is their answer to handling data traffic. It's Cisco's answer to IP switching and I-PNNI. In this way it takes advantage of Cisco's routers and StrataCom's (one of Cisco's many mergers) switches. On the lighter side, in the afternoon Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, gave a colorful presentation with Dilbert strips that never made it to the paper. Ended the day by attending an interesting session, "Strategies for Gigabit Ethernet and ATM". The first speaker was Bernard Daines, President and CEO from Packet Engines,Inc. He was a strong advocator of Gigabit Ethernet for the enterprise background. The benefits he listed were: seamless interconnect, no brainer scalability, significant economics of scale and motherhood, apple pie and Ethernet. Although he made some good points, it was clear that he was not very objective. Dominic P. Orr, President and CEO from Alteon Network, Inc. thought that Gigabit Ethernet would be used predominately in servers and backbones. He also presented some statistics from Infonetics,1997, which stated that the biggest factor that will prompt a user to purchase high performance LAN Products immediately is server bottlenecks and that the following percentages showed what server users are connected to: 41% workgroups 56% server farms and clusters 3% others His belief was to use Gigabit Ethernet at the server and possibly for the enterprise backbone. He said that ATM for the backbone would make sense if applications required guaranteed QOS, if ATM-aware applications proliferate, or if consistent LAN/WAN strategies are required. According to him ATM was unsuitable for servers since it introduces new protocols, affects staffing, network management, etc. Hmmm, isn't it curious that both Packet Engines, Inc. and Alteon Networks, Inc. are Gigabit-Ethernet startup companies. The last speaker in this session was Nachman Shelef, VP from 3COM Israel. He basically said that ATM was not going to make it to the desktop but that it would in the WAN. He also thought that both Gigabit Ethernet and ATM would be used for the campus backbone and to the servers. DAY 4: Visited the exhibition hall. There were approximately 100 vendors. ATM is a reality and it is evident by the displays. SUN demoed their 622 Mbs adapter which they've been marketing since the Fall of 1996. Bay Networks, Cisco, Cabletron, Fore, Newbridge, Samsung, Pac Bell, 3-COM and many others had functional demonstrations of their switches. Numerous companies demoed their ATM adapters (Adaptec, Efficient, Interphase, SUN...). The HP booth only displayed the HP ATM analyzers. There were impressive audio and video displays by 3COM. A good percentage of the booths were WAN related. There appears to be a lot of investment in ATM and that it is definitely a reality in the WAN area. There were demos of large multimedia file transfers, video conferencing, and distance learning. Digital's booth was in a great location, first display to the left of the main entrance. However, it was not a very interesting display. Basically just a static display of our ATM equipment and certainly no freebies. There did not appear to be much activity but once when I saw a couple of people there I decided to listen in. One person was asking for literature on the VNswitch. The Digital representative said that it was sitting on some loading dock but he could get back to him. The second person asked if the VNswitch supported ABR. The Digital representative nervously said "what's ABR? I'm sure we have it if it's the latest stuff". Then he looked at my badge and said "well maybe she knows". I answered the question but was very disgusted with 'DEC', needless to say how the customer must have felt. In addition to the exhibitions, I attended a number of sessions. The first one was interesting since the speaker was Jim Scott, Digital's ATM director. He talked about IP switching as a router replacement and how Digital's switch was able to handle both IP switching and LANE. The presentation went very well and was well received. John McQuillan, the ATM chairman, had this remark: "a very compelling idea to have both IP switching and LANE....a way to hedge your bets". One person asked if DEC was going to boycott MPLS. Jim said that it was a matter of focus and funding. That to date the focus had mainly been smaller networks, basically the building and campus backbone but that DEC would probably get into MPLS. Attended other sessions that day that were more focused on the WAN and a special presentation by Jeff Marshall, Senior Managing Director for Bears, Stearns' Communications Technologies Group. What a polished character he was. He has implemented one of the largest ATM networks in production use. He presented us with a very flashy presentation trying to stress how critical time is, how time is money and that the technical people just don't get it. He simply cannot have his network go down, each second cost money and there is simply no time for upgrades, maintenance, etc. DAY 5: Last day of the conference...day ends at 1:00. I spent the morning listening to Jason Caley from Digital discussing Digital's approach to multimedia over ATM. He was pretty entertaining and convincing. He was basically marketing the Gigaswitch/IP solution. The track leader favorably remarked on Digital's approach. The other presenter was James Honeycutt, from Microsoft who described how they set up their own internal IP network. Basically he said that they were able to work by adding switched Ethernet to offices, and Gigabit Ethernet with RSVP and COS and that they did not need ATM. For some reason this talk was not a big hit. From 12:00-1:00 was the conference synthesis. Each track leader shared their experiences during the week long event. Here are some of their observations: General Summary: - Feeling of certainty for ATM at the core of public networks - Global sales of ATM LAN/WAN products and services are expected to exceed $1 billion this year - Sales for ATM in the LAN are growing 164% per year - Clearly all big vendors are going to do both Gigabit Ethernet and ATM ATM Customer and Applications Track Summary: - ATM is being deployed with great success in many enterprise networks - LANE works very well and is rock solid even in large networks supporting over 2,000 users - ATM network management still needs a lot of work ATM Products Track Summary: - ATM to desktop is not dead, although it has become a "religious issue" for those in favor - ATM ABR hardware is now hitting the market (without full signaling software capabilities) ATM Public Services Track Summary: - Native ATM services are becoming a reality (most PVC based) - Pricing of ATM services could drop to equal that of Frame Relay but billing is still a problem - An open issue is carrier-to-carrier internetworking ATM and the Internet Track Summary: - Many internetworking alternatives (TAG/MPLS/IP switching) are under discussion but too early to tell what will win Future ATM Technologies Track Summary: - Scaling ATM to terabit performance will not be an obstacle...but software could be the bottleneck - Lots of spectrum available and the technology will be available for delivering wireless ATM services even at speeds of 155 Mbs and above ATM Standards Track Summary: - Sessions dominated by end-users, not vendors - Work on ATM APIs continues to move ahead - Discussed the development of a public-to-private ATM addressing scheme or name server CONCLUSION: Overall, I thought this was an extremely informative conference. I entered the conference with many questions and left with most of them being answered. I also left with new questions, new insights and tons of ATM documentation. There was too much for one person to see; many interesting tutorials and sessions going on in parallel. I look forward to attending next year and have copies of all the slides from each conference session if anyone is interested in seeing them.