Re: [nznog] Vector, did you try turning it off and then on again
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Richard Naylor wrote: | OK MAN CPEs are tricky. A cheap UPS is useless. The line interactive | type do let thru spikes and surges and if your CPE device has a cheap | switching PSU it will often lock up, die, or do nasty things. So to get | a decent UPS (ie rectifier followed by inverter) you need to spend over | $1k. | And given that Vector were using, at the time, Cisco 29xxG's (I think. Pretty sure they were just dumb L2 switches) for CPE, a $1k UPS would almost double the equipment cost per install. That's not inconsiderable. | Then you have batteries and maintenance. A typical power company (I used Which was really my point. Keeping a lot (and it'll number in the hundreds for Vector) of UPS's up and running isn't a trivial ask. The cost would be phenomenal, and every time batteries need to be changed it's an outage for the CPE that's on the end of it. *SNIP* | If you want to help your MAN supplier deliver a better performance and | you run a nice UPS, then offer to give them some of your 230V off your | UPS. Then you know that they have power at your end. And if you have a | diesel as well....... | | Its a nice cheap solution, and you know the performance of their backup. | Yeah, I think that was kind of what Vector were hoping for. But a lot of their terminating switches are buried in basement rooms to which only the building manager has a key. I know that we had quite a few instances of banging heads on walls trying to get access to put our kit in with Vector's, because the keys to the appropriate room were hard to locate. - -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIaWaWTdEtTmUCdpwRAvxSAKDIVU4tPqlHaZxpDSbZkk5s6XfwXgCeP99z rgL579ASX+9AcBjhAlgC56g= =sQy1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:04:54 +1200
Matthew Poole
Which was really my point. Keeping a lot (and it'll number in the hundreds for Vector) of UPS's up and running isn't a trivial ask. The cost would be phenomenal, and every time batteries need to be changed it's an outage for the CPE that's on the end of it.
I think your knowledge of UPS technology is rather limited to the consumer end of the market. You'd centralise your power requirements, and protect the spurs themselves, as opposed to devices or racks, and you'd then protect the UPSes with an alternate supply source - usually diesel generators ( and, allegedly unlike one UK mobile operator, check the level of diesel in the tanks on a regular basis (: ). Also you have been able to change batteries on an UPS whilst live for many, many years. Steve
*SNIP* It would seem that a power failure in the neighbourhood, however short, instantly *kills* the all services that are provisioned over the connection. Surely the building switch(s) (vector/isp?) and the rest of the network equipment (vector?) should be protected by UPS so as to avoid failure during short power outages? *SNIP* Yeah, I think that was kind of what Vector were hoping for. But a lot of their terminating switches are buried in basement rooms to which only the building manager has a key. I know that we had quite a few instances of banging heads on walls trying to get access to put our kit in with Vector's, because the keys to the appropriate room were hard to locate. *SNIP Well I went down to the basement and lo and behold, a UPS! It also appeared to be connected to the right equipment too (although i adopted a strictly stand back and look approach so I couldn't be sure that the wires were connecting to the right places given they were hidden inside conduit). Whether or not it is working sufficiently I won't be able to tell but as 'luck' would have it there is a scheduled power outage later this month and I will have a chance to assess whether the problem lies here, or hidden somewhere else along the way. ##################################################################################### This e-mail message has been scanned for Viruses and Content and cleared by MailMarshal #####################################################################################
At 11:04 a.m. 1/07/2008, Matthew Poole wrote:
| Its a nice cheap solution, and you know the performance of their backup. | Yeah, I think that was kind of what Vector were hoping for. But a lot of their terminating switches are buried in basement rooms to which only the building manager has a key. I know that we had quite a few instances of banging heads on walls trying to get access to put our kit in with Vector's, because the keys to the appropriate room were hard to locate.
Ah - access - the other bane of a utility's life. Get yourself a "tradesmans key" There are endless stories of how access was "obtained" during fault conditions. Requires copious quantities of beer to bring them out. In Wellington the MED would leave a building without power if the substation didn't have an external door with an MED lock fitted. Thats when the building was being built. The Electricity Act used to give all sorts of powers, just as the Telecommunications Act gives powers to network operators. These powers really are needed to make things work. I've used them 3 times in 30 years. The tradesmans key gets used most weeks :-)
This is all very nice talking about Vectors outage however what I don't quite understand is that I was told point blank by several people that the problem was caused by Vectors circuit to Wellington failing. Now if this was the case why was there an interruption of services being delivered inter/APE? Classic example was a machine hosted over at Orcon was visible over Orcon's DSL links but was not over any Kordia links located in Auckland. Or for that matter Iconz, and a couple of other providers that were tested at the time. I would have thought that the very nature of peering exchanges would enable connections via peered providers. UPS and Battery Backup are a joke, I often wonder why critical systems don't employ external direct connections to battery systems rather than having to used PSU's, UPS's and Inverters. Granted these are often packaged in pretty housings but they are still not as efficient as running a device off the power it was designed to work with. Take a leaf out of the Military's book. Most of their gear has an external DC option so it can be connected to something in the field and will run for ages. Heck you can even get 3000AH 12V Disposable Cells these days. And no I did not make a mistake. That is 3KAH. When you work that into what a router draws (1.2AH) or there about that's a heck of a long time. Even the new generation deep cycles these days have a cyclic life of some 3 to 10 years. I had a PSU failure on one critical site some time back, due to the ugly battery system I had set up with NO inverter we ran for around a week without the PSU. When it was reconnected there were no outages. The same site previously had been set up with an inverter and the best we managed to get was around 24Hrs of uptime. Andrew Hooper Hooper Communications Borg WiFi - Bushwireless www.bushwireless.com +64 9 533-6470 +64 21 212-9200 broadband for those hard to reach places. My status Get Skype and call me for free. -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Poole [mailto:matt(a)p00le.net] Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 11:05 AM To: NZNOG Subject: Re: [nznog] Vector, did you try turning it off and then on again -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Richard Naylor wrote: | OK MAN CPEs are tricky. A cheap UPS is useless. The line interactive | type do let thru spikes and surges and if your CPE device has a cheap | switching PSU it will often lock up, die, or do nasty things. So to get | a decent UPS (ie rectifier followed by inverter) you need to spend over | $1k. | And given that Vector were using, at the time, Cisco 29xxG's (I think. Pretty sure they were just dumb L2 switches) for CPE, a $1k UPS would almost double the equipment cost per install. That's not inconsiderable. | Then you have batteries and maintenance. A typical power company (I used Which was really my point. Keeping a lot (and it'll number in the hundreds for Vector) of UPS's up and running isn't a trivial ask. The cost would be phenomenal, and every time batteries need to be changed it's an outage for the CPE that's on the end of it. *SNIP* | If you want to help your MAN supplier deliver a better performance and | you run a nice UPS, then offer to give them some of your 230V off your | UPS. Then you know that they have power at your end. And if you have a | diesel as well....... | | Its a nice cheap solution, and you know the performance of their backup. | Yeah, I think that was kind of what Vector were hoping for. But a lot of their terminating switches are buried in basement rooms to which only the building manager has a key. I know that we had quite a few instances of banging heads on walls trying to get access to put our kit in with Vector's, because the keys to the appropriate room were hard to locate. - -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIaWaWTdEtTmUCdpwRAvxSAKDIVU4tPqlHaZxpDSbZkk5s6XfwXgCeP99z rgL579ASX+9AcBjhAlgC56g= =sQy1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 8.0.101 / Virus Database: 270.4.3/1526 - Release Date: 6/30/2008 8:43 AM
Speaking from a Cisco perspective; this is not the case. The typical AC power supply in Cisco kit is around 93% efficient. The DC power supply option (which you can purchased for direct connection) is around 70% to 80% efficient. So those people who elect to use DC only for power will need a lot more power. The reason for this is it is more efficient to convert 240VAC (or 110VAC) to 12VDC, 5VDC (and sometimes 3.3VDC and 48VDC), than it is to convert 12/48VDC to those same voltages. Most military network equipment is not DC powered. If you have a tight power budget you need to go AC. -----Original Message----- ... UPS and Battery Backup are a joke, I often wonder why critical systems don't employ external direct connections to battery systems rather than having to used PSU's, UPS's and Inverters. Granted these are often packaged in pretty housings but they are still not as efficient as running a device off the power it was designed to work with. Take a leaf out of the Military's book. Most of their gear has an external DC option so it can be connected to something in the field and will run for ages. ...
The problem lies with the inversion - inverters are horrendously inefficient and require a significant amount of standby current to run, even with no load. ________________________________________ From: Philip D'Ath [pid(a)ifm.net.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 1 July 2008 10:03 AM To: Andrew Hooper; NZNOG Subject: Re: [nznog] Vector, did you try turning it off and then on again Speaking from a Cisco perspective; this is not the case. The typical AC power supply in Cisco kit is around 93% efficient. The DC power supply option (which you can purchased for direct connection) is around 70% to 80% efficient. So those people who elect to use DC only for power will need a lot more power. The reason for this is it is more efficient to convert 240VAC (or 110VAC) to 12VDC, 5VDC (and sometimes 3.3VDC and 48VDC), than it is to convert 12/48VDC to those same voltages. Most military network equipment is not DC powered. If you have a tight power budget you need to go AC. -----Original Message----- ... UPS and Battery Backup are a joke, I often wonder why critical systems don't employ external direct connections to battery systems rather than having to used PSU's, UPS's and Inverters. Granted these are often packaged in pretty housings but they are still not as efficient as running a device off the power it was designed to work with. Take a leaf out of the Military's book. Most of their gear has an external DC option so it can be connected to something in the field and will run for ages. ... _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog
On 01/07/08 11:47, Andrew Hooper wrote:
I would have thought that the very nature of peering exchanges would enable connections via peered providers.
They do. Unfortunately, when a provider reaches a given peering exchange via a circuit from another provider (say, Vector), and that provider breaks for a few hours, then you're likely to see traffic between providers take weird/different/long paths, or just break completely where there is no alternative L3 path between providers. -Mike
On 1/07/2008, at 11:47 AM, Andrew Hooper wrote:
Heck you can even get 3000AH 12V Disposable Cells these days. And no I did not make a mistake. That is 3KAH. When you work that into what a router draws (1.2AH) or there about that's a heck of a long time. Even the new generation deep cycles these days have a cyclic life of some 3 to 10 years.
"Routers" require 1.2A at 12VDC? My little Soekris boxes draw that, roughly, or at least that's what they say they need from a PSU. Anyway, same ballpark. They are not big routers, infact, they are very very small routers. They do no have fans. A Cisco 2600 has a 600W PSU. That's roughly 2.5A at 240V. At 12V that's 50A. A Cisco 2600 is a very very small router, one step above a home office router, I suppose. ps. yes I know they don't always eat 600W. A 2600 is also a very small router, I doubt Vector have any in the path of customer frames. I can't be bothered going and getting power requirements for bigger boxes. -- Nathan Ward
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Nathan Ward wrote: | ps. yes I know they don't always eat 600W. A 2600 is also a very small | router, I doubt Vector have any in the path of customer frames. I | can't be bothered going and getting power requirements for bigger boxes. | Based on my experience, they do it all at layer 2. Connections are delivered by fibre into a Cisco switch that then has layer 3-provider kit plugged in with everything delivered as VLANs. That's how they did it to start with, and I don't see any particular reason to change that MO. - -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIaZPfTdEtTmUCdpwRAn+fAKC7c60kkWxOO4nk68E2GY/MMEieFgCg1dRv BBCz3MrwU67Ob8YuGV6QsHY= =JBYP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Nathan Ward wrote:
On 1/07/2008, at 11:47 AM, Andrew Hooper wrote:
Heck you can even get 3000AH 12V Disposable Cells these days. And no I did not make a mistake. That is 3KAH. When you work that into what a router draws (1.2AH) or there about that's a heck of a long time. Even the new generation deep cycles these days have a cyclic life of some 3 to 10 years.
"Routers" require 1.2A at 12VDC?
My little Soekris boxes draw that, roughly, or at least that's what they say they need from a PSU. Anyway, same ballpark. They are not big routers, infact, they are very very small routers. They do no have fans.
Indeed. I can cite a few examples of router power consumption which are vastly in excess of that. Any metro Ethernet operator is likely to be using something similar in the core/aggregation, at the least. Alcatel-Lucent 7x50: between 50A and 175A per chassis, at -48V DC. Juniper T-series: between 60A and 175A per chassis, at -48V DC. Juniper M-series: between 20A and 130A per chassis at -48V DC. Juniper MX-series: 5.1KW per chassis. Cisco 7600 series: 40A+ per chassis at -48V DC Cisco CRS-1: 11KW per shelf, up to 72 shelves. Telcos tend to use DC, since most of the existing deployed plant is based around supplying DC power. Edge devices, depending on the size of the edge involved, can be anywhere up to 40A or so - I've seen quite a few edges that use 7600s :). As Matthew pointed out, most of Vector's edges *used to be* Cisco Cat 2900/3500/3750, which typically consume more in the 250W-750W region. The problem IME with several operators has been the maintenance of hundreds/thousands of UPS and batteries. This is not a solution which scales very well, but is pretty much required. Two things that operators (both the retail service providers and the metroE operators) could do to ensure continuity of service: 1) Stop providing active edges at customer sites - simply handoff GE via optical services and be done with it. Bring in more fibre to the customer site if you need density. 2) Find a customer with key infrastructure, and place the equipment on their UPS/genset. ISTR that Citylink used to do this where they could; and certainly when I was at Maxnet we put the Vector CPE on our UPS'. Interestingly, telcos that deploy SDH mux equipment to customer sites tend to install them with a full 48V DC plant, including rectifiers and often inverters. Perhaps the MetroE guys need to take a look at how the telcos have done it in the past, if they are wanting to meet that 'five nines' of telco-land? aj
Alastair Johnson wrote:
Interestingly, telcos that deploy SDH mux equipment to customer sites tend to install them with a full 48V DC plant, including rectifiers and often inverters. Perhaps the MetroE guys need to take a look at how the telcos have done it in the past, if they are wanting to meet that 'five nines' of telco-land?
Yep - I can hear it now... "We're cheaper than the Telcos though." And thats true, but I think the MetroE guys need to be offering a wider range of SLAs. People are coming to rely on them more and more and it's not always made clear to the customers what the risks of a particular technology is. Dean
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Dean Pemberton wrote: | Yep - I can hear it now... "We're cheaper than the Telcos though." | | And thats true, but I think the MetroE guys need to be offering a wider | range of SLAs. | People are coming to rely on them more and more and it's not always made | clear to the customers what the risks of a particular technology is. | Businesses are also far more cognisant of the economic dangers associated with loss of power. If they get told that in a power outage their internet goes away, they understand that. If they're told that they can guard against the outage at their end with a relatively inexpensive UPS, they'll understand that too. But if they're not told, then they can't take steps to mitigate the risk. The ideal situation is, as has been suggested, to get the CPE plugged into a generator-backed UPS. That requires knowledge on the part of the people who would be supplying the UPS and the generator, though. - -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIaZ1mTdEtTmUCdpwRAnWlAKCBW3GCiJwMCvOKCDAH48ciou5lEwCdG0gI yVnI/CqvmPavZh+wDPMoETs= =J7u9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On 1/07/2008, at 2:47 PM, Alastair Johnson wrote:
Interestingly, telcos that deploy SDH mux equipment to customer sites tend to install them with a full 48V DC plant, including rectifiers and often inverters. Perhaps the MetroE guys need to take a look at how the telcos have done it in the past, if they are wanting to meet that 'five nines' of telco-land?
You know, I don't think I've ever seen one of those racks' power gear serviced. -- Nathan Ward
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Nathan Ward
On 1/07/2008, at 2:47 PM, Alastair Johnson wrote:
*snip*
*snip*
Can I suggest we drop this topic? Except token. he has good things to say. Beer beer beer. -- /* Mike Forbes || Cell: +6421 999 416 || Email: mike(a)nothing.net.nz GPG: BFC7 3F32 2CCF D91F 53E1 DF88 1578 B2E4 1399 6844 */
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Mike Forbes
Can I suggest we drop this topic?
Really? Discussion on the various approaches to providing power redundancy on MetroE networks and the comparison to real Telco grade resiliency? Seems pretty relevant and interesting to me, and it hasn't yet degenerated into name calling! Asahi!!! Cheers - N
Alastair Johnson wrote: [...]
Interestingly, telcos that deploy SDH mux equipment to customer sites tend to install them with a full 48V DC plant, including rectifiers and often inverters. Perhaps the MetroE guys need to take a look at how the telcos have done it in the past, if they are wanting to meet that 'five nines' of telco-land?
aj _______________________________________________
Alastair, you know that telco "five nines" tends to apply to a subset of the network, not necessarily to a single customer connection. Are you sure there's a good reason to deploy 48V DC to customer premises beyond that being needed for the SDH kit? A chain of devices with customer premises mains supply at one end adds single points of failure for the connection. Is the improvement in power quality worth it? - Donald Neal -- Donald Neal | "You can have security, or functionality, Research Officer | or scale - you can even have any two of WAND | these. But you can't have all three" The University of Waikato | - Prof. Ross Anderson
Donald Neal wrote:
Alastair, you know that telco "five nines" tends to apply to a subset of the network, not necessarily to a single customer connection.
Yes, that's correct. Although there are many telcos that define explicitly how their SLA is measured, and on what components it affects. I've personally signed contracts with a few telcos that make mention of access SLAs vs. the core SLAs.
Are you sure there's a good reason to deploy 48V DC to customer premises beyond that being needed for the SDH kit? A chain of devices with customer premises mains supply at one end adds single points of failure for the connection. Is the improvement in power quality worth it?
I never suggested it was a good reason or should be done - but that perhaps the MetroE providers should look at how telcos have delivered high availability (whether it's five nines or not) in high value services. Whether MetroE costs a little or a lot, many people are placing high *value* on it - and part of that value should be around "how do we make sure it works as close to all the time as possible". It's been said that UPS' don't scale (even I agree with this), yet somehow the telcos have managed to deploy many services with active electronics at the customer end, where they have also deployed their own power protection systems. Perhaps there's a market for Cisco and other vendors to introduce MetroE switches/NTUs with batteries built in. aj
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Alastair Johnson
Whether MetroE costs a little or a lot, many people are placing high *value* on it - and part of that value should be around "how do we make sure it works as close to all the time as possible".
I think this may have been alluded before on this thread, but people only value a network when there are end user hosts/devices connected to it. This means that having a shared fate with the customer device (wrt power) is not only adequate, but possibly even desirable. One possible solution: If your customer has a major switching node using -48V dual power feed battery and diesel system, plug your CE into that (make sure you sales team asks first though!). If your customer has a single PC plugged into your service, plug in your CE device to the same 4-port power strip they're using. This way, when you get a power outage they say "Oh no, my switching node is down, damn power company", not "Oh no, the network is down, damn MetroE provider" even though the network is actually down as well. The other end of the fibre is your problem and the SLA should be used to define how much power reliability you need there. The situation you don't want is for power to be down and affecting your CE and not the end customer device. As descibed above UPS-type solution is not the only way to ensure this.
Alastair Johnson wrote:
As Matthew pointed out, most of Vector's edges *used to be* Cisco Cat 2900/3500/3750, which typically consume more in the 250W-750W region. Usually quite a bit less than that, unless you're running PoE. Cisco do make the Metro Ethernet Equiv that can run on 48v. Interestingly, telcos that deploy SDH mux equipment to customer sites tend to install them with a full 48V DC plant, including rectifiers and often inverters. Perhaps the MetroE guys need to take a look at how the telcos have done it in the past, if they are wanting to meet that 'five nines' of telco-land? SDH equipment typically has some nice things for mananging dry contact alarms. This means you can have a relatively dumb rectifier whereas in an ethernet world you need to move up to a managed 48v rectifier system to get an ethernet port. There's quite a price difference. It's also noticable that low end SDH gear has plumeted in price. So the total cost maybe lower than expected. Our experience with 48v rectifier systems (same box but in different locations, including remote microwave towers and cabinets) has been very good - very reliable but there aren't cheap ones (AU$2k+ plus batteries).
GEPON used with low amounts of splitting allows quite cost effective, low fibre utilization passive solution - only CPE is at the customer end. There are some very cool systems out there to do this and even run E1s across them for voice. MMC -- Matthew Moyle-Croft Internode/Agile Peering and Core Networks Level 4, 150 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia Email: mmc(a)internode.com.au Web: http://www.on.net Direct: +61-8-8228-2909 Mobile: +61-419-900-366 Reception: +61-8-8228-2999 Fax: +61-8-8235-6909
This is something that economics and market forces should be able to work out. We've had two metro fibre companies now claim that UPSs are too-hard(tm), We've also had a bunch of customers say "Thats bad, we want the network to stay up if the power goes out". Now what we need to have happen is for those providers to tell the customers how much extra that feature is going to cost. Isn't it better to say "We do offer that service, it's $xxx extra per month and you didn't order it" rather than "It's all too hard! Nasty little UPSes, we hates them" Lets see some options. Then if they are too expensive for people then economics can take care of things. Dean
Richard Naylor wrote:
| OK MAN CPEs are tricky. A cheap UPS is useless. The line interactive | type do let thru spikes and surges and if your CPE device has a cheap | switching PSU it will often lock up, die, or do nasty things. So to get | a decent UPS (ie rectifier followed by inverter) you need to spend over | $1k.
On [Various Times], [Many People Wrote] wrote:
[Words]
A 9 hour outage seems long, but it's hardly absurd. Though we haven't seen a cause report from Vector yet, if it was spade fade, 9 hours is pretty good. I wasn't on call when it broke, but my colleague who was tells me he was told "Hardware Failure" was the problem. If something like a 6509 plane died, I can see how you might hit 9 hrs: The thing faults, alarms go off, customers call, the on-duty tech at Vector has to do some basic diagnosis, wave his hands in the air and run around like a monkey for a bit, call the on-call call engineer. Then that engineer has to wake up and/or finish his beer and get home from the pub, then do some more diagnostics, see the dead module and then do that thing where you put your hands flat on your forehead and drag them down your face while going "Gahhhhh". Then he gets to go pull a spare from stores, or call Cisco for a part and then THEY get to kick off THEIR internal process to get the thing to you. Then there's truck time to the site, waiting for an elevator to L48 of the sky tower that isn't already full of tourists in orange jumpsuits ready to jump off and/or carts full of crab canapes, swaping out the dead unit, sanity checking the restored services and making config changes if required, etc. And all that is just if everything does go to plan, and you don't find out that your spare hardware is in the lab, and the lab is locked and the guy who has the key has gone fishing, or that Cisco have already given their only spare WS-X6516 to someone else, and so on and so on. So, anyway, thing is, 9hrs, sure. However it really shouldn't matter that much. The ISP network I am currently fussing over, for example, has vector connectivity to the Sky Tower, which carries APE and some other stuff. This all broke when Vector went down. Domestic traffic, however, simply switched over to other peering links, as it should because it is, you know, The Internet. Some Vector-only stuff broke, of course, but core services just failed over and carried on. If your network connection is absolutely critical for your business, and it's wholly dependent on one vendor, you should perhaps rethink your approach. Talk to your ISP, explain that you need redundancy in your connection. Chuck in something like a DSL connection beside that Vector link. Ask your ISP about sourcing you a router than can connect to both, and setting up BGP or MPLS-based failover to your secondary link in the event that your Vector link fails. Now your connection is vendor independent (if not ISP-independent - if they fail, you fail. Try to pick an ISP that Does Not Fail Much). If you can't get DSL, ask your ISP about Wireless or IPStar or something similar. If you can fail from optical to satellite, that's pretty good diversity. And it's not complicated to do. You may not get the same performance, of course, but you'll have _a_ connection, which is better than _no_ connection, especially if it's only for a short time. This setup won't, of course, solve the problem of a local power cut killing your Vector link. I'm not even certain why we're discussing that. Talk to Vector and your electrician to get a cable run from your generator and/or UPS-backed distribution board to wherever your building vector switch is. Plug the switch into it. And you're done. It's a one-off cost, and likely not a large one. Even without a UPS, the worst that can happen is that the switch powers down when the cut takes place, then boots back up when your generator starts. A few minutes, tops. If you _don't have_ a generator, and your building power is out, I guess you'll be sitting in the dark, looking at your blank screen, and won't care if your internet connection is down. This is a perfect opportunity to go to the pub, and have a drink with the Vector engineer. Assuming he's awake. JSR -- John S Russell Big Geek. Doing Geek Stuff.
participants (17)
-
Alastair Johnson -
Andrew Hooper -
Curtis Bayne -
Dean Pemberton -
Donald Neal -
John Russell -
Jonathan Woolley -
Matthew Moyle-Croft -
Matthew Poole -
Michael Jager -
Mike Forbes -
Nathan Ward -
Neil Gardner -
Philip D'Ath -
Regan Murphy -
Richard Naylor -
Steve Holdoway