[60754] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: East Coast outage?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Fri Aug 15 13:43:27 2003
In-Reply-To: <OFE94FE974.CBC24C02-ON80256D83.0056B503-80256D83.00577545@radianz.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: Joe Abley <jabley@isc.org>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:38:52 -0400
To: Michael.Dillon@radianz.com
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Friday, 15 August 2003, at 11:55AM, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
>
>> Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always
>> lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more
>> autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more
>> reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging
>> failure modes.
>
> And if we extrapolate that lesson to IP networks it implies that any
> medium to large sized organization should do their own BGP peering
> and multihome to 3 or more upstream network providers.
I don't think that extrapolation is entirely reasonable. The purpose of
the Internet is to provide global connectivity; the purpose of a power
generation and distribution network is to provide access to power,
regardless of where it was generated.
> On the other
> hand, if you understand why electrical networks shed load and develop
> their cascading failures, you might see some parallels between "load"
> and the propagation of BGP announcements which are worrying.
A mismatch between content providers and consumers seems like a natural
challenge for an Internet of distributed content. It's not obvious to
me that you need to engineer around that problem in the power network
to the same extent.
I wonder how much of the understanding and "100 years experience" of
building power distribution networks is based on the fact that
affordable, distributed, small-scale power generation is not possible,
mandating large-scale, centralised generation and correspondingly
complicated transmission. Perhaps the power generation problem needs
the attention of a fresh set of eyes.
Joe
