IPMP, anyone?

While scanning various news feeds this morning I ran into a story regarding a computer breakdown at the LAX airport. The first article suggested the problem was a network card failure, and the second article suggested the problem was a switch failure.

In either case, the result was 17,000 - 20,000 (varies by atricle) international passengers being stranded for a fairly significant duration. But wait, it gets better... "The system was restored about nine hours later, only to give out again late Sunday for about 80 minutes, until about 1:15 a.m. Monday." Two failures, both stopping passengers at an incredibly busy airport.

I'd like to offer my consulting services to LAX for free, and recommend that they move an obviously critical function over to servers running the Solaris operating environment where they can enjoy the benefits of IP MultiPathing (IPMP). A properly architected system would have had redundant switches, and multiple network interfaces, each connected to a unique switch. The failures indicated would have cause no interruption to service. This is server design 101.

What, you may ask, would be the cost of this highly advcanced architecture? Well, of course it depends on the cost of the switches you run because you'd need two, but on the server side its free, and included with Solaris. I run IPMP on the servers in my basement, and my wife can assure any who may ask, my IT budget is far less than that of the mighty LAX airport.