You say "responsible cab drivers must have not one, but two taxicabs, in order to provide service in the event of a failure. Therefore, I bought one from Fisher-Price, and one from Hot Wheels, and I'm astounded to find that neither provides me with the luxury which I expected." I think Patrik may have been suggesting that if you had a Checker, you might not need to worry quite so much about redundancy.
...and then a meteor lands on the checker... Better variant of the analogy would be "we lease checkers from a fleet provider, so if one goes out we have access to more." Short-term the best hope for this is for businesses to put their boxes in colo farms or at an ISP with multi-homed networks in place. The problems start when customers try to multi-home from their HQ facility or from somewhere else that's isolated. Convincing customers that it is cheaper/better to put their main servers somewhere off-site away from them is the challenge. Otherwise more of them would do it. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/