Rofl Matt, I was recently laid off from my job for 'economic' reasons, what you say is deadly accurate. Bravo! :) On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>wrote:
On 4/13/09, George William Herbert <gherbert@retro.com> wrote:
Matthew Petach wrote:
George William Herbert <gherbert@retro.com> wrote: Matthew Petach writes:
[much material snipped in the interests of saving precious electron resources...]
This was all in one geographical area. Diversity out of area will get you around single points like that, if you know the overall topology of the fiber networks around the US and chose locations carefully.
But even that won't protect you against common mode vendor hardware failures, or a largescale BGP outage, or the routing chaos that comes with a very serious regional net outage (exchange points, major undersea cable cuts, etc)....
There may be 4 or 5 nines, but the 1 at the end has your name on it.
Ultimately, I think a .sig line I saw years back summed it up very succinctly:
"Earth is a single point of failure."
Below that, you're right, we're all just quibbling about which digits to put to the right of the decimal point. If the entire west coast of the US drops into the ocean, yes, having my data backed up on different continents will help; but I'll be swimming with the sharks at that point, and won't really be able to care much, so the extent of my disaster planning tends to peter out around the point where entire states disappear, and most definitely doesn't even wander into the realm of entire continents getting cut off, or the planet getting incinerated in a massive solar flare.
Fundamentally, though, I think it's actually good we have outages periodically; they help keep us employed. When networks run too smoothly, management tends to look upon us as unnecessary overhead that can be trimmed back during the next round of layoffs. The more they realize we're the only bulwark against the impending forces of chaos you mentioned above, the less likely they are to trim us off the payroll.
Matt
Note--tongue was firmly planted in cheek; no slight was intended against those who may have lost jobs recently; post was intended for humourous consumption only; any resemblence to useful content was purely coincidental and not condoned by any present or past employer. Repeated exposure may be habit forming. Do not read while operating heavy machinery.
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