East Coast outage?

Joe Abley jabley at isc.org
Fri Aug 15 17:38:52 UTC 2003



On Friday, 15 August 2003, at 11:55AM, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

>
>> Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always
>> lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more
>> autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more
>> reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging
>> failure modes.
>
> And if we extrapolate that lesson to IP networks it implies that any
> medium to large sized organization should do their own BGP peering
> and multihome to 3 or more upstream network providers.

I don't think that extrapolation is entirely reasonable. The purpose of 
the Internet is to provide global connectivity; the purpose of a power 
generation and distribution network is to provide access to power, 
regardless of where it was generated.

>  On the other
> hand, if you understand why electrical networks shed load and develop
> their cascading failures, you might see some parallels between "load"
> and the propagation of BGP announcements which are worrying.

A mismatch between content providers and consumers seems like a natural 
challenge for an Internet of distributed content. It's not obvious to 
me that you need to engineer around that problem in the power network 
to the same extent.

I wonder how much of the understanding and "100 years experience" of 
building power distribution networks is based on the fact that 
affordable, distributed, small-scale power generation is not possible, 
mandating large-scale, centralised generation and correspondingly 
complicated transmission. Perhaps the power generation problem needs 
the attention of a fresh set of eyes.


Joe




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