Every once in awhile, you hear a story like “there was a case of a 1-Gbps NIC card on a machine that suddenly was transmitting only at 1 Kbps, which then caused a chain reaction upstream in such a way that the performance of the entire workload of a 100-node cluster was crawling at a snail's pace, effectively making the system unavailable for all practical purposes”. The stories are interesting and the postmortems are fun to read, but it's not really clear how vulnerable systems are to th...
