On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 02:11:40PM -0400, Leo Bicknell wrote:
In a message written on Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 01:51:54PM -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
Personally I tend to suspect the general lack of uproar is a rather unfortunate (for them) sign that PAIX is no longer relevant when it comes to critical backbone infrastructures.
That, or a sign that operators are doing their job. There should be enough redundancy in the system that loss of any one site, for whatever reason, doesn't cause a major, or even minor disruption.
If you have a Cisco router that craps out on a regular basis, Cisco will tell you to get a second one. Some people find this to be a great solution, while other people go buy a Juniper. This probably isn't the way they wanted to announce this, but PAIX is rolling out a new 10GE capable platform (the Extreme Aspen series). Equinix is about to follow suit with their 10GE platform, and the only other two modern competetive IX's in the US have already deployed new 10GE capable platforms (NYIIX with Foundry MG8 and NOTA with Force10). Of course the europeans have had customers up on 10GE for 6 months now, and at a fraction of the price that the US IX's will be charging, but lets ignore that and focus on our own backwater continent right now. :) At the moment, the US IX's largely price their ports as high as the market will possibly bear (and then sometimes a few bucks more just as a kick in the teeth), and largely doesn't have 10GE ports available for either customers or multiple-site trunking. This means that most serious providers don't even have the option of public peering at interesting capacities, even if they weren't concerned about reliability issues. As the US IX market finally gets its act together and rolls out 10GE, many networks are going to start upgrading, and start putting much larger amounts of traffic on them to save on PNI costs. After all, we both know that due to current financial conditions not every network can afford to have all of the spare PNI ports they would like to ensure that they have sufficiently diverse/redundant interconnections with their peers, yes? :) With these IX's poised to take another order of magnitude step (remember the good 'old days when GE seemed to large?), they are about to get another shot in the arm as far as being used for mission critical peering infrastructure is concerned. But no matter how good an idea it may be to make sure that you "always have diverse capacity at another location", if one IX is having significantly higher numbers of disruptions than the rest, the network operators are going to go elsewhere (well after their 5 year contracts are up at any rate). Besides, I don't think "and for when we go down, there is an Equinix facility down the road" is really the marketing angle that Switch and Data had in mind. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)