Technology and More: Routing at Layer 2 ? YES, TRILL is here

As per wikipedia, TRILL (Transparent Interconnect of Lots of Links) is a IETF Standard implemented by devices called RBridges or Routing Bridges. TRILL combines the advantages of bridges and routers and is the application of link state routing to the VLAN-aware customer-bridging problem. RBridges are compatible with and can incrementally replace previous IEEE 802.1 customer bridges. They are also compatible with IPv4 and IPv6 routers and end nodes. They are invisible to current IP routers and, like routers, RBridges terminate the bridge spanning tree protocol.

But how does it performs routing on layer 2, Okie...

TRILL uses a routing protocol (IS-IS) and the TRILL protocol used to forward Ethernet frames (TRILL data frames) definitely has all the attributes of a layer-3 protocol:

TRILL data frames have layer-3 addresses (RBridge nickname);
They have a hop count;
Layer-2 next-hop is always the MAC address of the next-hop RBridge;
As the TRILL data frames are propagated between RBridges, the outer MAC header changes.

However, once the TRILL infrastructure is set up and the best paths are computed, bridging forwarding paradigms are used to forward host-to-host data traffic, including building MAC address table by listening to data traffic and flooding of packets sent to unknown MAC destination. TRILL therefore retains most of the non-scalable properties of transparent bridging with these exceptions:

Convergence is faster and more predictable;
Data forwarding can use all the available links;
Core RBridges (those that have no non-TRILL links) do not need to know the end-station MAC addresses;
Edge RBridges need to know end-station MAC addresses only for the VLANs in which they participate (but that’s also true in existing well-designed bridged networks).

With the evolution of 10G networks and other protocols like Fabricpath and TRILL, I believe STP would have already started dying a slow death and its time for the network engineer to look beyond RSTP & MSTP to keep themselves competitive in the coming times.