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As is sometimes the case, the idea for this article originated with a student question I received during one of the Securing Networks with ASA Fundamentals classes I have taught this summer. The course material mentions a simple scenario whereby IP Telephony traffic...

That depends on their configurations. For example: While it makes very good sense to include redundant physical links in a network, connecting switches in loops, without taking the appropriate measures, will cause havoc on a network. Without the correct measures, a switch floods broadcast frames out all of its ports, causing serious problems for the network devices. The main problem is a broadcast storm where broadcast frames are flooded through every switch until all available bandwidth is used and all network devices have more inbound frames than they can process.

Now that the network is installed, each switch has a bridge ID number, and the root switch has been elected, the next step is for each switch to perform a calculation to determine the best link to the root switch. Each switch will do this by comparing the path cost for each link based on the speed. For paths that go through one or more other switches, the link costs are added. The switch compares this aggregate value to the other link costs to determine the best path to the root switch.

Despite an organization's efforts to prevent downtime and avoid compromises, failures will still happen from time to time. How do you plan for failures?

License provisioning has always been a bit of a challenge in the CUCM environment. Prior to CUCM v9.0, licensing was managed on a per-cluster basis with each cluster requiring its own license files that were tied to the media access control (MAC) address of the cluster’s publisher. This approach to license management was limiting in the fact that one cluster might have unused licenses while another cluster may be at its limit and sharing between clusters was not possible.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) planning is the process of developing the plans, processes and procedures to respond to the range of incidents. We start with understanding the essential functions of an organization, called Business Impact Analysis (BIA). In life, we set the same priorities: protection of family and friends, shelter, food and water and other life-giving essentials.

One size does not always fit all. At times there’s a need to run more than one routing protocol and have more than one routing domain: multivendor shops, migration from one protocol to another, scalability issues of a single protocol, political or personal preference, production versus test networks, mergers, and acquisitions.

The purpose of Interior Routing Protocols (IGP), and routing protocols more generally, is to advertise the existence of destination networks. All protocols then have some method of picking what they would consider to be the best path and maintain the information. By...

Take charge of your Cisco network devices with Python programming As a network engineer, you might wonder why there’s any need for you to learn Python. After all, network automation is clearly where the industry is headed. And there are many tools that allow yo...

A longtime leader in data analytics, Google continues to earn their position by continually improving their data analytics offerings. Now, with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you can capture, process, store, and analyze your data in one place, allowing you to change your focus from infrastructure to analytics that informs business decisions. However, you can also use GCP Big Data tools in combination with other cloud-native and open-source solutions to meet your needs. Below is an overview of GCP Big Data Tools and how you might utilize them to improve analytics.