In technology terms a black is a full outage and a brown out is a congestion situation. The usual thing is that a blackout is debilitating while a brownout is an inconvenience. However, in many cases congestion is just as debilitating as an outage especially in the case of a network or even a service desk.
Domino effect
Let us assume that to deliver a resources we need 10 resources. These resources might be people, processes or tools. Now, assume there are only 9 resources. Logic would deduce that the delivery service would degrade by 10%. However, this is incorrect as the delivery of services immediately drops by 25%. This is because the impact of forcing other resources to try and close the gap, also reduces their effectiveness. Additionally, over time the service delivery starts trending further downwards because of a cascading dominoes effect where eventually a full outage situation might as well be declared.
Thus if you have a service desks that just survives with 25 people and you cut down to 20, expect chaos. If you have a 100 Mb/s network link and you try and push 150 Mb/s through it expect chaos. Don't expect a proportional degradation in service levels!
Xerox
So if you end up with blackouts or brownouts, how do you solve it? We use the cow analogy! This is the advice that Anne Mulcahy have to successfully revive the ailing fortunes of Xerox, the well-known copying and printing firm as reported by the Economist here.
“FIRST, get the cow out of the ditch. Second, find out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, make sure you do whatever it takes so the cow doesn't go into the ditch again.”
Telecommunications Last Mile
Win the Last Mile of deployed telecommunications links brownouts are responsible for the significant majority of faults. These faults are result in service degradation but not a hard down of a link. The causes of brown outs are varied and include congestion, fibre maintenance operations, path redirects, network kit exceeding their processing abilities, bug and even cyber attacks.
Unluckily, ISPS and especially first level support is usually unable to diagnose brownouts which leads to user frustration. However, a solution like Fusion's SD-WAN keeps an ISP honest as all those events are transparently visible.
Ronald Bartels ensures that Internet inhabiting things are connected reliably online at Nepean Networks - the leading specialized SD-WAN provider in South Africa. 👉 Contact Nepean 💪
