nanog mailing list archives

Re: Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?


From: Jared Mauch <jared () puck nether net>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2013 08:28:19 -0500


On Feb 6, 2013, at 7:57 AM, Alex Rubenstein <alex () corp nac net> wrote:

Would you rather your ISP not maintain their devices?  Are the 
consequences "so bad" of a 30 minute outage that your business
is severely impacted?

- Jared

You had me up until that line.

That should be expanded a little ...

First, I'd say, yes - many businesses would be severely impacted and may even have consequential issues if they had 
to sustain a 30 minute outage. Suppose for a moment they couldn't process money machines transactions for 30 minutes; 
or Netflix couldn't serve content for 30 minutes; or youporn was offline for 30 minutes.

The question should be more along the lines of, "why aren't you multihomed in a way that would make a 30 minute 
outage (which is inevitable) irrelevant to you?

Yeah, perhaps not as elegantly worded as I would have hoped, but there are many reasons things "go down".  Just one of 
those elements is the internet part, there's also transport, power, and other elements that combine to make this 
complex system called the internet.  If you N+N or N+1 your power, perhaps something similar for your connectivity is 
important.  Or you just plan to be down/broken periodically for 30 minutes and have a plan to cover that.

The building where our NOC is located sometimes gets evacuated.  Having a plan for that is important.  During one 
visit, there was a small fire in the building (or so we were told).  Certainly an unexpected event that disrupted us 
for ~30 minutes.  

The handling and response of these events certainly is important.  I do want to understand why and how it's so bad so 
if there are things as a SP in the community we can improve upon we can do that.

That's my real goal, not poking at people who are single homed and down.

- Jared

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