After early August’s widely publicized outage among several Internet providers, a lot of ServerCentral’s customers are curious as to why they didn’t see any impact.
The short answer? ServerCentral deploys a modern and scalable routing infrastructure supported by experienced engineering staff.
The long answer is a bit more complex. Technically, here’s what happened:
The number of devices connected to the Internet has exploded in the last ten years. This, coupled with the de-aggregation of the global Internet routing table, has caused an increase from just over 100,000 routes in the early 2000s to over 500,000 routes in 2014.
The IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes that routers learn from internal and external sources are placed in a Routing Information Base (RIB), also known as a routing table. After the router applies the appropriate criteria and determines the best path, the forwarding logic for that path is programmed into the Forwarding Information Base (FIB), which is normally a function of hardware ASICs in modern networks.
There are some routers that, due to being left in a default configuration state or due to their age and lack of hardware ability, simply could not program the necessary FIB entries into their hardware after the global routing table exceeded 500,000 routes.
The net result for many provider networks that either failed to upgrade their hardware or configure it properly was the widespread and simultaneous failure of multiple routers across multiple networks.
What makes ServerCentral unique is that our Network Engineering team proactively looks for ways to stay in front of issues like these. Decades of aggregated experience across multiple environments, combined with hands-on experience and attention to detail, help our team prevent issues like this.
Contact us to discuss this or any other technical issue with our Network Engineering staff.
