All that juice comes at the price of redundant network links, though -- which means the whole thing got taken offline last night when a homeless man threw a cigarette onto a mattress under Boston's Longfellow Bridge, starting a blaze that eventually melted the fiber-optic link between Boston and New York.

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All four of the new systems include full hardware redundancy, redundant storage and network connections and allow for live operating system upgrades, Sun said.

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Verizon said it built its wireless network to be redundant in case of a natural disaster.

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Launched in April, the 1, 000-node network is anchored by two redundant 3Com CoreBuilder 9000 switches interconnected by dual 1Gbps Gigabit Ethernet-trunked connections.

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With NGFWs, multiple layers of redundant protection are available at the firewall level as well as the network and client device level.

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