N+? redundancy

Michael.Dillon at radianz.com Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Mon Apr 18 16:24:52 UTC 2005


> Even if a client demanded and was willing to pay for the 
> diverse paths there can be none available.

When there is demand for something that the market
cannot supply due to political constraints, then there
are political solutions.

> The number of paths varies widely between cities, and has
> little to do with demand in those cities for diversity or how 
> critical they might be to the nation as a whole.

If requirements for network path separacy can be communicated
in such a way that people clearly see that it is critical
to the nation (or any other political body) then it is 
possible to release additional path opportunities to the
market.

The rules of thumb that I suggested had to do with how
much network redundancy is likely to be "enough network
redundancy". I also didn't supply the numbers to back up
these rules because, to the best of my knowledge, nobody
has studied the risks involved in enough detail to do
analyse this.

I did receive one anecdotal account related to the ice storm
in Montreal back in '98, I believe. It seems that this
city of over 1 million inhabitants had 5 paths providing
electricity to the city and 4 of those paths were knocked
out. 

Interestingly, nobody suggested my numbers were too low
or too high. I suppose that is a rough and ready tacit
approval of my rough and ready rules of thumb.

--Michael Dillon

P.S. Let's hope that Jay gets his Mediawiki off the ground
so that we can develop other "best practice" rules in a
format that makes it easy to use them for training new people
coming into the industry.




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