MAE West

Mon Jul 14 13:33:08 UTC 1997

> At 11:38 PM 7/13/97 -0700, Stephen Stuart wrote:
> >As Lance Tatman pointed out, load-balancing only works between
> >circuits joining the same two switches. This would certainly be a
> >factor in planning what kind of wide-area connectivity to use to join
> >two groups of switches. A single 400Mb/s aggregate might perform much
> >better than a pair of 200Mb/s aggregates.
> 
> 	Better performance, but worse reliability?
> 
> 	The single 400Mb/s is, after all, a single point of failure, no?
> 
> d/

To true.  Would you care to cover the cost of replicating the 400Mbp/s
to build in better reliability?  It appears that the owners/operators of
MAE-West are selecting an optimization path based on the assumption that
outages are infrequent and can be quickly corrected.

--bill