RE: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?

["Frank Bulk" <frnkblk () iname com>]

I actually speak for an ISP, not an enterprise at this time -- my apologies
for not making it more clear.  When I said "our network" I was really
referring to our residential and business broadband subscribers.  Among our
business subscribers, only a handful actually have SUS in place.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Nash [mailto:billn () billn net] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 3:36 PM
To: Frank Bulk
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:

> Every month I look at my upstream bandwidth graphs and I see no blip in
the
> hours before 3 am on Microsoft's Black Tuesday.  I would think that with
the
> thousands of PCs out on our network downloading updates around that time
> that I would see *something*.  I know every Black Tuesday I see my three
> PC's blinking a logon screen.
>
> Are MSFT's monthly updates really a non-event in regards to internet
> bandwidth?

Users are too far from the firehose to feel the more interesting effects.
That said, it's hit or miss, from month to month. If you have peering to a
CDN network (llnw, akam, etc), you'll certainly see Patch Day roll
through, since you're sitting on the aggregation of a large flow of data.
As an end user, especially in an enterprise with admin's that are worth
anything, you're not talking about a massive amount of data, in many
cases. Service packs, sure, those are generally a bit bigger, but hotfixes
and the like, usually pretty small. I don't even notice patches on my home
connection, since they're a drop in the bucket compared to all the other
content rolling around. Youtube and similar content flows are more
noticeable.

I think the only enterprise users who would notice a large influx of
data are the ones who don't run caches.

- billn