[VoiceOps] Acme SBC geographic redundancy

[David Birnbaum]

On Sun, 6 Sep 2009, Alex Balashov wrote:

> The reality is that to get this HA setup going with geographically redundant 
> endpoints - including getting the routing stuff right - will require that you 
> spend 90% of your resources to get the last 2% of reliability.  Even then, if 
> anyone harbours delusions of fast, seamless protection switching, well, 
> prepare to be disappointed.  It's not going to happen.  Nor should it happen. 
> It's just not economical, and not worth doing.

That's an interesting statement.  I agree with your thoughts on resource 
allocation, but your blanket comment about whether or not it should happen and 
is worth doing is another and probably deserves more consideration.

There is a status quo, and as carriers large and small shift to VoIP and start 
to change the status quo implicitly (ie, we're no longer going to offer the type 
of resiliency we've traditionally had in the voice network), we do a disserve to 
the "masses", so to speak, that harbor expectations to the contrary and don't 
differentiate no matter how many contracts you wave in their face.  Particularly 
somebody else is buying the service on behalf on a large organization that has 
no idea of what's going on.

The "cheap" voice providers get to cut corners (or just don't bother) to save 
costs.  The "expensive" voice providers end up caught between regulatory and 
technical costs and demand to follow suit so they don't lose their user base. 
One day, a totally unexpected outage occurs and suddenly that last 2% starts to 
loom unexpectedly large for all involved.

I think it's good that conversations like this happen to make the implicit 
considerations more explicit.  Having lived through my fair share of disasters 
here in NYC and watching networks fail in unexpected and grandiose ways, I find 
that lack of perspective is not doing the VoIP any favors.

Cheers,

David.