On 2005-06-20, at 18:49, jamie.baddeley(a)vpc.co.nz wrote:
Some good points Michael, but I suspect your analysis doesn't include failure doesn't include a visit from Mr FatFingers and friend at the Operations console.
This is a wildly good point. Vijay Gill did an analysis of AOL's Nx10G backbone network which he presented at a NANOG a while back, and it transpired that the overwhelming majority of customer- affecting outages were due to operator error, rather than equipment or circuit failure.
The only way downstream can protect itself from Mr FatFingers at Upstream is through institutional diversity, and no amount of network architecture within an single management entity can avoid that. And really that's a decision based on the the premise that people do stupid stuff in different organisations at different times. And I know we all make mistakes.
What Jamie said. Joe