Hello everyone,
I want to bring up a concern I have about Level 2 redundancy. Right now, 3
sources, external to NOAA, relay Level2 data to University and commercial
customers. Purdue, OU and Max Gigapop (MG).
During the OU power outage a few weeks ago, all of us were getting delayed
Level 2 data. I tried to feed from sites which fed off of Purdue, but
they were sending out delayed data as well. Maybe they were down at the
time, I don't know. But what data was getting to us was very
delayed...and ultimately was coming via MG.
The issue of them sending greatly delayed and missing data has been going
on for well over a year now. I appreciate all the sites sending out Level
2 data, either free, or for profit from the source. However, for the data
to be effective for use, it must be consistently available almost all the
time (and by that, I am not saying 99.999%, but I am saying it needs to
be there almost all of the time, and within a few minutes of real-time,
if you relay the data). I have also heard from others that the
consistently delayed data is a problem for their institutions or
companies. My question is, what is/are the cause(s) of the problem(s),
and what can be done about it so that we have three reliable Level 2 data
sources? Is it a slow server? Not enough bandwidth? Old LDM running at
less than optimal configuration? How can these or whatever issues causing
the difficulties be solved, and what needs to be done?
Tonight, the UNIDATA server was slightly less than overloaded, and I
managed to get a rtstats snapshot of the level 2 data routing and delays.
http://weather.admin.niu.edu/level2rtstats.gif
You can see that virtually every arrow coming out of Maryland has a cream
color to it: a delay of over 50 minutes. Coming out of Purdue and OU, less
than 1 minute. Purdue seems to absorb the feed from MG. TAMU, LSU(?) are
getting very delayed feeds from MG. Everyone else is spot-on except for
one.
Again, I'm not ripping on MG; I'm asking questions and trying to get some
answers. If OU and Purdue go down, I want that third spoke in the wheel to
be just as good as the other two in terms of reliability, and speed.
On a secondary note...I just learned that they got a bypass going for
the Internet/I2 connections here at NIU tonight. So, while everything else
is down here on campus, my servers, email and data should be humming along
just fine tonight. Unless, of course, another power substation around
here decides it wants to do this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-711022817903815072#
Thanks for your time,
Gilbert
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Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
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