North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Converged Networks Threat (Was: Level3 Outage)

  • From: Petri Helenius
  • Date: Wed Feb 25 13:53:04 2004

David Meyer wrote:

Is this an accurate characterization of your point? If
so, why should sharing fate in the switching fabric
necessarily reduce the resiliency of the those services
that share that fabric (i.e., why should this be so)? I
have some ideas, but I'm interested in what ideas other
folks have.
I think it has been proven a few times that physical fate sharing is only a minor contributor to the total connectivity availability while system complexity mostly controlled by software written and operated by imperfect humans contribute a major share to end-to-end availability.

From this, it can be deduced that reducing unneccessary system complexity and shortening the strings of pearls that make up the system contribute to better availablity and resiliency of the system. Diversity works both ways in this equation. It lessens the probablity of same failure hitting majority of your boxes but at the same time increases the knowledge needed to understand and maintain the whole system.

I would vote for the KISS principle if in doubt.

Pete