Hi
Keep in mind that many people site the phone as a highly available system,
but do you know that it is highly available? People get the impression that
the phone system is very reliable because they are used to hearing a dial
tone when they pick it up. But most people are not on the phone 24x7 and
have no real idea if their phone is available or not.
I wish I could find the URL, but there was a study done at one of the
universities back east that actually checked the availability of the phone
system there and compared it to peoples belief's as to the availability of
the system. Most people felt the phone system was up more than 99.9% of the
time, as they almost never picked up a dead phone, but in fact the phone
system was only up about 98% of the time.
Now this begs the next question... do people need 99.999% uptime on the
phone system or on their network? Keep in mind that 99.999% uptime equals to
apx 1 minute of downtime per 30 days. Many network managers want to give the
99.999% guarantee to their internal/external customer and are willing to
give SLA's to that effect without ever seeing if there really is a need for
it.
I am asked a couple of times a month for a 99.999% solution. By the time
they answer a few questions they figure out that they can easily withstand
more than 1 minute per month of down time.
With the idea that BGP is growing widely with all of the /24 companies
joining the table, is a real shame. I would venture to say that many of the
companies out there could stand to take the down time of a single connection
or a multiple connection to the same ISP and never really hurt their
business. I can not say if BGP will scale to meet this growing "need", but I
can tell you that having to get more and more memory and CPU to handle the
larger and larger routing table is a burden and a pain. Hopefully someone
much more intelligent than I will find a simple and easy solution.
BTW, yes some places multihome their phones too... I was at one for awhile.
$0.02
--
John Hardman CCNP MCSE
""Priscilla Oppenheimer"" wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Aside from Priscilla (not Geoff Huston): What if the phone system had
> evolved this way? How many companies have redundant trunk lines? Don't we
> just assume that the "phone company" will always provide service? We don't
> multihome to the phone system, (do we?)
>
> Priscilla
>
>
Message Posted at:
http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=5482&t=5468
--------------------------------------------------
FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html
Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
