VRRP: Increasing Reliability and Failover with the Virtual Router Redundance Protocol

1.2. Networking and Availability

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, networking has many different aspects. To appreciate better the issues of its availability, we need to have a basic understanding of these aspects. Since different aspects of networking are subject to different disciplines, so are the availability discussions related to these aspects: protocol design, system engineering, formal methods, queueing theory, and so forth. In addition to recognizing this multidisciplinary nature, we can also observe some interesting relationships among the diverse façades of networking. The subtlety and the complexity of these relations contribute to the complexity of the availability subject. What are these aspects? What are these peculiar ...