Metro Ethernet
Reviewer Name: Paul Miller
Reviewer Certification: Pursuing CCIE Security
I recently read the book titled Metro Ethernet, authored by the legendary Sam Halabi. Let me be the first to say that this title lives up to Mr. Halabi's high standards for delivering top quality information. Sam Halabi does an excellent job of taking away the smoke and mirrors of the often misunderstood world of metro Ethernet. This book explains, in superb detail, every way to skin the metro Ethernet cat. The author does it in a way that helps to give the reader a complete understanding of a particular application of metro Ethernet without dropping the reader off the deep-end of this hybrid technology. The book is organized very well. The author has taken a crawl, walk, run approach to the layout of this book. The introduction alone gives the reader a great road map of the book, so the reader can pinpoint a given topic, rather quickly. In the past I've had to rely heavily on the Index to provide pointers to a given topic, but the Introduction of this book is a great reference.
Along with the author's previous book, Internet Routing Architectures, the author wastes little ink. Each topic is clear, concise and to the point. He's taken a lot of information from several sources and compiled the information in an easy to understand text. The illustrations help out a lot with capturing the complexity of the many different Metro Ethernet architectures. One thing I liked about the book is that the author gives the reader insight or background as to why a certain application of metro Ethernet was designed and where it is likely to be applied.
This book is best suited for telco carrier personnel or enterprise personnel at any level. Companies that are looking for different strategies for their metro area networking requirements will find this title very useful. For enterprise customers, this book is a great place to start, prior to calling in a consultant or discussing services offered by a service provider. Consultants will likely find this title very valuable to understand the complexities and furthermore gain the ability to transform the complex lingo into something palatable for a non-technical audience/customer. Telco support personnel would benefit a great deal by understanding what their existing offers are or perhaps alternatives to their current offerings. The book is well-rounded for a large target audience. A general understanding of the technologies discussed in this book is not really necessary, because the characteristics of the technologies discussed in the book are not implemented in the traditional sense. It does help to have an understanding of the technologies to be able to contrast the difference in the applications of metro Ethernet. There is a great deal of information that covers the use of MPLS in conjunction with metro Ethernet. The sections covering MPLS get a little more technical and may lose some individuals that are not technically savvy, however, the concepts are clearly stated.
There is another title that covers information about metro Ethernet technology offered by Cisco Press titled Cisco Self-Study: Building Cisco Metro Optical Networks (METRO) by Dave Warren and Dennis Hartmann. Since metro Ethernet is one of many technologies covered in this title, it doesn't have as much to offer on the subject of metro Ethernet as the book Metro Ethernet. The chapters overing metro Ethernet in Cisco Self-Study: Building Cisco Metro Optical Networks (METRO), focuse more on implementation details and the configuration of metro Ethernet in Cisco equipment. If you're looking for detailed information about metro Ethernet, I would recommend the book Metro Ethernet by Sam Halabi.
This is one reader that is thankful Sam Halabi chose to write another book.