Point taken, Availability would have been a better term to use.
>From a customers standpoint limited availability of bits is still better than no bits flowing and in an ideal world your published capacity would be N rather than N+1. Appreciate the thoughtful comments Regards - Scott Scott C. McGrath On Sat, 17 Jan 2004, Deepak Jain wrote: > [stuff snipped] > > > but the overall system reliability is much higher than a reliable network > > since a component failure does not equal a functional failure. > > > s/reliability/availabilty. > > You meant reliability when comparing a 1 vs 2 engine airplane, but a > network (from a customer point of view) isn't defined by reliability, > its defined by availability. > > If you are using your backup (N+1) router(s) for extra capacity, than > you don't fail back to full capacity, but you do have limited availabilty. > > Availability/Performance of the overall system (network) is what we all > engineer for. Customers don't care about reliability as long as the > first two items are not impuned. (For example, they don't care if you > have to replace their physical dialup port every hour on the hour, > provided that they can get in and off in between service intervals --not > a very reliable port, but a highly available network from the customer > perspective). > > Maybe I am just picking on semantics. > > Deepak > > >