Re: How relable does the Internet need to be? (Was: Re: Converged Network Threat)

["Stephen Sprunk" <stephen () sprunk org>]

Thus spake "vijay gill" <vgill () vijaygill com>
> Unfortunately, while this sounds excellent in theory, what really
> happens is that you have a large chunk of equipment in the network
> belonging to vendor X, and then you introduce vendor Y. Most people
> I know don't suddenly throw out vendor X ... . People don't do that
> because it costs a lot of capital and opex.  So now we have a partial X
> and partial Y network, X goes down, and chances are your network
> got hammered like an icecube in a blender set to Frappe.

I think an important factor in this is that multiple vendors are rarely
deployed within redundant pairs, which at least has a hope of surviving one
vendor's cascading software faults.

More often, each vendor's products are used universally in particular
tier(s) in the network, such that a failure of one vendor may leave you with
no access but a working core, or vice versa.

S

Stephen Sprunk        "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723           people.  Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS         smart people who disagree with them."  --Aaron Sorkin