Re: How relable does the Internet need to be? (Was: Re: Converged Network Threat)

[vijay gill]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 11:48:17AM +0000, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com 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