Is your ISP Influenza-ready?

Tue Apr 18 04:54:31 UTC 2006

At 09:50 PM 4/17/2006, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

>On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, David W. Hankins wrote:
>
> > In a www.washingtonpost.com article:
> >
> >       http://tinyurl.com/s2jpz
> >
> > It is said:
> >
> >       President Bush is expected to approve soon a national pandemic
> >       influenza response plan that identifies more than 300 specific
> >       tasks for federal agencies, including [some stuff and] expanding
> >       Internet capacity to handle what would probably be a flood of
> >       people working from their home computers.
> >
> > That's not a lot of detail, and the article only cites www.pandemicflu.gov
> > as a reference.  They don't appear to have published any detailed plan
> > that Pres. Bush is evidently about to sign there.  What is published there
> > feels like background information, and is vaguer still.
>
>How about this idea... are your corporate VPN services (assuming there is
>one aside fromm 'ssh to the bastion host' of course) prepared to
>double/quadruple/more-uple their normal concurrent user counts? During the
>fallout of Katrina we observed this being a problem for some of the
>corporations in region :( I know that quite a few folks plan for 50% or
>less of their employees to be 'dialed in' :( If 100%, or some majority,
>how do the corp folks plan on supporting that? :(

Vendors like it because it's a revenue boost. It obviously requires build-ahead
capacity and maintenance of overload capacity that will likely sit 
idle for 99%
of it's life span. Who pays?

[ ..hears ISP product managers scurrying to create "PriortyVPN" or
"priority vpn" products as a result... heh -> implied trademark here]

-M<

--
Martin Hannigan                                (c) 617-388-2663
Renesys Corporation                            (w) 617-395-8574
Member of Technical Staff                      Network Operations
                                                hannigan at renesys.com  