Standards are standards for a reason. Standards allow customers to interconnect products with a hope that they will all work together easily and simply. It’s how the Internet was built, though not without some problems, and how all the networking vendors built their businesses. No vendor, not even Cisco or Hewlett-Packard, can go it alone in enterprise networking. Even the whisper that a vendor is not standards-compliant can ruffle feathers and get danders up, so vendors come up with ways to give lip service to standards compliance when they really want to push their proprietary protocols. Vendors should innovate and address customer needs, but they should do so in a way that doesn’t force customers into choosing either proprietary methods or standard protocols, something that Cisco seems to be doing with FabricPath and Transparent Connection of Lots of Links (TRILL).
Network Computing