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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: East Coast outage?
On vrijdag, aug 15, 2003, at 17:55 Europe/Amsterdam, [email protected] wrote: Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging failure modes. While this certainly has its advantages, I don't think it follows from Joe's remarks. What would follow is having many smaller transit networks rather than a few big ones. But I think in this regard IP is well ahead of the electricity people.And if we extrapolate that lesson to IP networks it implies that any medium to large sized organization should do their own BGP peering and multihome to 3 or more upstream network providers. Still, I don't think it's this simple, as the problem with power is that supply and demand must be the same at all times. So if a decent chunk of the network that connects the two goes down, the supply side gets into trouble because they're suddenly generating too much. If the difference is big enough it's probably impossible to arrive at a new equilibrium above 0 fast enough. If you connect everything together you can absorb bigger imbalances but then when you get one you can't absorb, the impact is larger of course. Fortunately in our business we have queues to smooth the spikes in network use and when we drop packets there are no sparks. Have a look at the work going on in the IETF multihoming in IPv6 (multi6) working group and the IRTF routing working group.Perhaps we should start working on a hierarchical routing system in which the concept of a "global routing table" cannot develop. Perhaps announcements and withdraws should have a TTL so that they never propogate very far from their source AS?
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