[53521] in North American Network Operators' Group
Simulated disaster exercise? Re: PAIX
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Sat Nov 16 20:46:43 2002
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 20:45:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <g3fzu1589p.fsf@as.vix.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
In the 1990's the MAEs and Gigaswitches would give us an unscheduled
failure of a major exchange point on a regular basis, which let us
demostrate our disaster recovery capabilities. With the improved
reliability, i.e. the PAIXes haven't had a catastrophic failure, we
haven't had as many opportunities to demonstrate how well we can handle
a disaster at those locations.
Without creating an actual disaster, what if all the providers turned off
their BGP sessions with other providers at a PAIX (or Equinix or LINX or
where ever), both through the shared switch and private point-to-point
links, for an hour. More than likely no one would notice, but then
we would have some hard data. Individually providers have tested parts of
their own network, but I haven't heard of any coordinated efforts to test
recovery across all the service providers in a particular location.
