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NANOG Meeting Presentation Abstract

Assessing Internet Resilience at a Key Node
Meeting: NANOG63
Date / Time: 2015-02-04 11:30am - 12:00pm
This item is webcast
Room: Salon I
Presenters: Speakers:

Michael Thompson, Argonne National Laboratory

Mike Thompson is a Cyber Security Analyst at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). He is currently the Resilience Assessment Lead supporting the Department of Homeland Security's Regional Resiliency Assessment Program evaluating the Ashburn area data data center cluster. He has lead and contributed to several projects including a variety of research for Argonne and analysis projects for the Department of Homeland Security. He is a lead developer on a patent pending moving target defense technology. In previous lives, Mike has taught high school and community education classes on technology, sound engineering, and ESL - he was an Operations technician and System Administrator for Google during the early days of their great global data center expansion -- and he has sold roadside produce all over the upper Midwest. His eclectic experience gives him a unique insight into the problems of computer security and privacy.
Abstract: The Ashburn, VA data center corridor has been a central hub of Internet traffic since the early days of the Internet when MAE-East was the primary place to interconnect with other service providers. Though Ashburn is not the single point of failure that it once was, large volumes of backbone traffic still route through IXPs and data centers in Ashburn and nearby areas. After hurricane Sandy rendered data centers in New York City and along the eastern seaboard inoperable, an exploration of the resilience of Ashburn facilities and the ability for the Internet to survive without them is critical. The Risk and Infrastructure Science Center (RISC) at Argonne National Laboratory is developing innovative approaches to assess internet slowdowns and reroutes based on facility and region level outages. For example, Argonne supports the Department of Homeland Security’s Regional Resiliency Assessment Program (RRAP), which will study data center and internet resilience in Ashburn during its FY 2015 series of projects. If the Ashburn/DC area were to suffer an outage, it is unlikely that the rerouting of such a volume of traffic would be successful. Although TCP is an extremely robust protocol which can effectively reroute around network problems, the routers themselves must have the capacity to deal with the amount of traffic routed to them. In addition to raw transit, it is estimated that 70% of Amazon AWS services are housed in the Ashburn area. Due to the data center concentration and transit locality of the area, it is likely that other cloud providers have similar concentrations in the area. We aim to investigate the consequences of losing singly homed services as well as the capacity issues involved in TCP routing internet traffic around a blacked-out Ashburn area.

In this presentation we will share hypotheses and areas of exploration of the RRAP and will engage the NANOG community in a discussion to help shape the scope of the study.
Files: pdfAssessing Internet Resilience at a Key Node(PDF)
youtubeAssessing Internet Resilience at a Key Node
youtubeAssessing Internet Resilience at a Key Node
Sponsors: None.

Back to NANOG63 agenda.

NANOG63 Abstracts

  • Network Integration Panel
    Moderators:
    Joe Provo, Google; Panelists:
    McGehee Games, CenturyLink; Steve Powell, Level3; Dave Siegel, Level 3 Communications; Richard A Steenbergen
  • Network Integration Panel
    Moderators:
    Joe Provo, Google; Panelists:
    McGehee Games, CenturyLink; Steve Powell, Level3; Dave Siegel, Level 3 Communications; Richard A Steenbergen
  • Network Integration Panel
    Moderators:
    Joe Provo, Google; Panelists:
    McGehee Games, CenturyLink; Steve Powell, Level3; Dave Siegel, Level 3 Communications; Richard A Steenbergen
  • Network Integration Panel
    Moderators:
    Joe Provo, Google; Panelists:
    McGehee Games, CenturyLink; Steve Powell, Level3; Dave Siegel, Level 3 Communications; Richard A Steenbergen
  • Network Integration Panel
    Moderators:
    Joe Provo, Google; Panelists:
    McGehee Games, CenturyLink; Steve Powell, Level3; Dave Siegel, Level 3 Communications; Richard A Steenbergen
  • DNS Track
    Moderators:
    Duane Wessels, VeriSign;
  • Real-world Network Automation
    Moderators:
    Matt Peterson, Cumulus Networks; Panelists:
    Bronwyn Lewis, Packet Clearing House; Carlos Vicente, Dyn; Jérôme Fleury, CloudFlare;
  • Real-world Network Automation
    Moderators:
    Matt Peterson, Cumulus Networks; Panelists:
    Bronwyn Lewis, Packet Clearing House; Carlos Vicente, Dyn; Jérôme Fleury, CloudFlare;
  • Real-world Network Automation
    Moderators:
    Matt Peterson, Cumulus Networks; Panelists:
    Bronwyn Lewis, Packet Clearing House; Carlos Vicente, Dyn; Jérôme Fleury, CloudFlare;
  • Real-world Network Automation
    Moderators:
    Matt Peterson, Cumulus Networks; Panelists:
    Bronwyn Lewis, Packet Clearing House; Carlos Vicente, Dyn; Jérôme Fleury, CloudFlare;

 
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