[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

This reminds me of the current flap over flu vaccinations. The entire
U.S. supply of flu vaccines from 2 vendors. 1 vendor (an overseas
vendor at that) in the UK gets closed down and mayhem ensues. Somebody
should be fired for this dumb decision.defense



I think a better analogy would be:

Take two flu vaccines with different properties from two vendors.  If the
flu gets through one line of defense hopefully it won't get through the
second.



Well, yes that would be part of the solution, but my point was there isn't enough flu vaccine to go around because they left the whole thing up to 2 vendors. They should have at least 3 or 4 vendors for something so important, or at least ensure that the 2 vendors had more than 1 single laboratory each to produce the vaccines. That is the dumb part.

In general, catastophic problems can be avoided through diversity. Whether it is routers, investing, flu vaccine vendors, or whatever.

Our parents/grandparents already taught us that when they said "don't put all your eggs in one basket".

To be Highly Available you must be redundant AND diverse.  I learned this
the hard way as I watched a bug in my software propagate to 17 "redundant"
servers, taking them all down one by one.  In my opinion this is were a
lot of hosting companies go wrong.  They claim high availability w/out
diversity, but my experience has shown that this isn't possible.



As with all lessons in life, every now and then, we need a reminder :-)

John

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