Resource Library

The short answer (and a common one in our industry): it depends. When comparing Cisco IOS with Juniper Junos, the decision to choose one over the other is difficult and often boils down to cost. Of course, there are other factors to consider.

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is dead, or at least it should be. It’s too slow to converge when there’s a change, and it causes issues with performance because there is only one forwarding path. It was developed in 1985 by Radia Perlman at Digital Equipment Corporation to allow for redundant paths within a Layer 2 topology, which was great in 1985. In fact, it was huge! So much so, that it was later standardized by the IEEE as 802.1D, and we’ve been living with it ever since.