Network Design
Confidence Levels and Calibration
05/21/2020
Being able to state your level of confidence helps you know whether your estimate is good enough, or whether you need to do more research to further reduce your uncertainty. It can also increase your chances of getting projects funded. Read More…
Measuring the Unmeasurable
05/20/2020
A measurement is a reduction in uncertainty. Not an elimination of uncertainty, but a reduction in uncertainty. The more accurate we can make the approximation, the more uncertainty we eliminate. Read More…
How Close is Close Enough?
05/19/2020
We engineers work in meterable, precise quantities. When we cannot come up with a precise number for something, we tend to get tripped up. Sometimes we dismiss as immeasurable – intangible – anything to which we cannot assign a firm numeric value.
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Taking the Art Out of Networking
05/18/2020
When we design or operate a network we don’t want a “master chef” that is striving for something creative and exciting. Excitement is seldom a good thing in networking. We want predictability and consistency. We want quantification, not art.
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Designing for Failure
10/17/2017
June’s British Airways IT outage, apparently caused by a power system failure, caused a stir among air travelers and the IT industry alike. Interestingly, the highly publicized August 2016 data center outage at Delta Airlines was also power system related. Why did a failure in a power system component bring down an entire data center? And why did they not have a functioning disaster recovery plan to fail over to a backup data center?
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