The network is reliable
While the article has collected an impressive list of public failures and post-mortems, I wouldn't exactly call them common. It also closes with the assertion that "some networks really are reliable. Engineers at major financial firms report that despite putting serious effort into designing systems that gracefully tolerate partitions, their networks rarely, if ever, exhibit partition behavior. Cautious engineering (and lots of money) can prevent outages."What does lots of money actually get you in this case? The more esoteric the hardware, the less real-world testing I would expect it to have gone through. Something like Solaris on SPARC might avoid unreliable NIC/drivers combinations but that's only one of the failure modes listed.Having a completely identical set of hardware purely for testing would be nice which is where lots of money would help, but some of these failures are so arcane, they sound like they'd be hard to replicate on duplicate hardware, never mind testing for them in the first place.