Wall Street WAN Managers to Eliminate Routers?
I was just in a meeting with the wide area network managers for a large Wall Street investment firm. These are the guys who architect the router network, CCIEs and all. As we talked through the future of their WAN, one of them said something I never thought I would hear as an unsolicited comment: "What we really want is a way to send L2 packets over the WAN as a connection…so we can just have a simple Ethernet Switch in the branch…eliminating the router altogether." I was astonished, after 5 years, the router-less branch is beginning to be seen by network managers, even by the router aficionados, as a potential reality. Back in 2002, the concept of a simple ...
