On Sat, 12 Oct 1996, Zachary DeAquila wrote:
Sure, Mike, but how do you protect against an airplane falling out of the sky? or having the building that houses your generators flattened by a runaway semi? Or the ever present possibility that the building next door will have a gas leak and explode? And what about that house-sized meteor that could come hurtling down?
I suppose you think this is funny. But the people who run datacenters for large corporations (like insurance companies) and important government operations (like the taxman) do take these things into consideration. That's why you find redundant locations (like muliple exchange points) and data centers that are located two stories underground. About the only scenario you mentioned that the underground data center is vulnerable to is the metoer and a baseball sized one would likely suffice to destroy a whole town. That's why it is wise to not have everything at one physical location. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
Give me a break. Hindsight is 20/20, it's easy to see how things could have been avoided,
That's right, so use hindsight to make better plans for the future.
but excessive paranoia can and does get in the way of getting real work done.
Not at all. Paranoia is for the people who make site plans and who reccommend site planning issues to management. It doesn't need to consume your attention all day long. Just be ready when the boss comes in for a tour, point at a box in the corner and say, "See that box there, if it breaks then the entire Northeast would be off the air for 24 hrs".
Any engineer worth his salt will tell you that 100% reliability is unattainable - IMHO, these days with the technology we work with daily as young as it is, I'm impressed with 90% uptime...
I'm not. Five nines quality *IS* attainable and the telcos generally manage this. Maybe individual components or subsytems will have as low as 90% uptime, but the entire mesh can be engineered for 99.999% uptime even with unreliable components like that. Five nines is equivalent to 8.76 hours downtime per year and that includes scheduled events.
For all the effort you put into saying how you could have done better,
I don't recall saying that I could have done better. I do recall saying that we (the industry as a whole) can do better in the future. Rather than throw up our hands when these events occur and say it's just bad luck, we can use them to learn where our blind spots are and fix the problems.
I hear the goverment has an installation that might meet your standards somewhere under Cheyenne Mountain....
I think that installation has much better than five nines uptime. What's wrong with learning from their example? If organizations like the Freemen and the OK City bombers weren't such frigging idiots they could probably destroy Western civilization as we know it by knocking out most of the USA's key power and communications infrastructure. Modern technological civilization is built on a house of cards and it's about time we started hardening the foundations before it collapses. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com