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In support of software-defined networking, Cisco has introduced several products to strengthen networks and meet the increased demand for flexible and cost-efficient solutions.

According to the OSI layer concept, routing, or best path selection, takes place on Layer 3 and is based on the logical address. In this post, we want to discuss some of the points in that statement.

A gap analysis is a tool that ITIL recommends organizations use to compare their current state to some future desired state.

The CCNAX - CCNA Routing and Switching Boot Camp is a great option to obtain Cisco Routing and Switching skills while pursuing the CCNA Routing and Switching certification.

ITIL is generally not prescriptive. In reality, the CSI Register at any given organization might look significantly different than the example given in the CSI book. The fields given in this example are important.

As IT professionals gravitate away from classroom training and toward on-demand courses and e-learning, IT skills gaps have spiked. Instructor-led training is still the best option to fill critical skills needs and shouldn't be pushed aside entirely for more convenient and cost-effective options.

The subject of this week’s post was actually prompted by a question from a former colleague.  Soon after the PIX Firewall added support for IPSec Virtual Private Networks, a command was added to the command-line, sysopt connection permit-ipsec. This command was subse...

Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) was a Cisco-proprietary Distance-Vector (D-V) classful routing protocol - basically an improved version of RIPv1. Like other D-V protocols, each IGRP router periodically flooded its routing table, but it differed from RIP in two ways. First, RIP’s advertisement interval was thirty seconds but IGRP’s was ninety seconds, which allowed IGRP to scale to larger networks than RIP. Second, RIP used a simple hop count metric, but IGRP’s more sophisticated metric was based on minimum path bandwidth and total path delay, with options to include link reliability and interface loading.

Previously, I talked about the logical and physical steps to building a basic certification lab, concentrating mostly on the CCENT/CCNA Routing and Switching level. Once you have that set of certifications under your belt, there are several options for specialization. Each of these advanced technology tracks serve as methods of enhancing your professional skill set as follows:

Anyone who’s managed switches over the years knows that the Spanning-tree protocol (STP) is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to the data center at layer 2 of the OSI model. On the plus side, the Spanning-tree protocol is what first allowed us to create redundant paths within our switching infrastructure, making our data center much more resilient to outages than ever before. Anyone who’s experienced a “broadcast storm” knows the full value of Spanning-tree in the traditional switching environment. We’ve also seen many improvements in Spanning-tree over the years to make it work faster and more efficiently (i.e. Rapid Spanning-tree, Bridge Assurance, and many others).