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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: How relable does the Internet need to be? (Was: Re: Converged Network Threat)
On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 11:48:17AM +0000, [email protected] wrote: > Similarly, the Internet has always had N+1 or better vendor resiliency > so IOS can have problems while the non-IOS vendor (or vendors) keep on > running. In fact, I would argue that N+1 vendor resiliency is a good > thing for you to implement in your network and N+2 vendor resiliency is > a good thing for the Internet as a whole. Let's hope that vendor P manages > > to get some critical mass in the market along with J and C. Unfortunately, while this sounds excellent in theory, what really happens is that you have a large chunk of equipment in the network belonging to vendor X, and then you introduce vendor Y. Most people I know don't suddenly throw out vendor X (assuming that this was a somewhat competent choice in the first place, jumped up l2 boxes with slow-first-path-to-setup-tcams-for-subsequent-flows don't count as somewhat competent). People don't do that because it costs a lot of capital and opex. So now we have a partial X and partial Y network, X goes down, and chances are your network got hammered like an icecube in a blender set to Frappe. You could theroetically have a multiplane network with each plane comprising of a different vendor (and we do that on some of our DWDM rings), but that is a luxury ill-afforded to most people. /vijay
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