On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 11:48:17AM +0000, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
Similarly, the Internet has always had N+1 or better vendor resiliency so IOS can have problems while the non-IOS vendor (or vendors) keep on running. In fact, I would argue that N+1 vendor resiliency is a good thing for you to implement in your network and N+2 vendor resiliency is a good thing for the Internet as a whole. Let's hope that vendor P manages
to get some critical mass in the market along with J and C.
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 (assuming that this was a somewhat competent choice in the first place, jumped up l2 boxes with slow-first-path-to-setup-tcams-for-subsequent-flows don't count as somewhat competent). 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. You could theroetically have a multiplane network with each plane comprising of a different vendor (and we do that on some of our DWDM rings), but that is a luxury ill-afforded to most people. /vijay