Simulated disaster exercise? Re: PAIX

Sun Nov 17 01:45:07 UTC 2002

In the 1990's the MAEs and Gigaswitches would give us an unscheduled
failure of a major exchange point on a regular basis, which let us
demostrate our disaster recovery capabilities.  With the improved
reliability, i.e. the PAIXes haven't had a catastrophic failure, we
haven't had as many opportunities to demonstrate how well we can handle
a disaster at those locations.

Without creating an actual disaster, what if all the providers turned off
their BGP sessions with other providers at a PAIX (or Equinix or LINX or
where ever), both through the shared switch and private point-to-point
links, for an hour.  More than likely no one would notice, but then
we would have some hard data.  Individually providers have tested parts of
their own network, but I haven't heard of any coordinated efforts to test
recovery across all the service providers in a particular location.