bzmeteorite
join:2006-02-15
Nipomo, CA
| reply to RadioDoc
Re: whatever happened to redundancy?
said by RadioDoc  :We'll wait for you to figure out how much of the Internet was actually "down" during this outage. Extra credit: Level 3 is one transport provider. How many others are there? Considering Level 3 is a Tier 1 provider, and it affected a wide area, I would imagine it affected many people, including other carriers (other Tier 1s that are peering, down to [especially single-homed] Tier 3s). That doesn't necessarily mean the effect was noticeable (in a crippling way) to all end-users, or wasn't countered by the other carriers.
Of course, the ones that are redundant would have just rerouted traffic (transit or peering) to another location, but that would have increased load on other circuits, possibly causing slow downs. Also assuming that the datacenter(s) in question weren't their only links in a chain to the rest of the world.
I skimmed the article and sub-articles, but was unable to find the cause of the Level 3 outage, only the AT&T one (also supported by Slashdot). I do find it interesting that a carrier as large as AT&T had power problems, usually backup power is N+1 or better. Are they really as reliable as they claim? Or only when the weather suits them?
Extra Credit: That depends on your definition of "transport provider". Assuming you mean a Tier 1, as Level 3 is, there are 7 others (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest, Savvis, NTT, and Global Crossing). If you consider Tier 2s, there are likely thousands worldwide.
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