Simulated disaster exercise? Re: PAIX

Sun Nov 17 18:55:29 UTC 2002

On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 08:45:07PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:

> 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.

There was a major power outage in Amsterdam on November 6th, which took
down the power at 2 major housing locations (Nikhef and SARA), which
house the original 2 AMS-IX sites, and lots of routers.

Even though Amsterdam (and AMS-IX) is a major hub for european
connections, most worked as usual, though some Dutch destinations has
higher than normal delay and packet loss.

/Jesper

-- 
Jesper Skriver, jesper(at)skriver(dot)dk  -  CCIE #5456
Senior network engineer @ AS3292, TDC Tele Danmark

One Unix to rule them all, One Resolver to find them,
One IP to bring them all and in the zone to bind them.