Cisco SD-WAN (formally Viptela) is quickly becoming the go to WAN solution for Cisco customers. As companies are looking to replace their aging DMVPN solution, Cisco SD-WAN has become the logical choice. Companies can stick with the same ISR platform running IOS-XE that they already know, and in some cases can upgrade their existing routers to work with SD-WAN. But this blog isn’t a sales pitch...

You read that right! At Cisco Live this year they introduced the ability to add Catalyst switches to the Meraki dashboard. Finally a use for the unused DNA licenses! The switches are monitored in read-only mode, so you still need to manage the switches the old fashioned way, however Meraki's traffic analysis and troubleshooting tools are available for use. This is great for Catalyst owners who do...

I recently completed my Ekahau Design training and certification. During the first day of class the instructor went over wireless fundamentals. Now as an experienced wireless engineer most of the topics were ideas that I had already known, however there were a few idea's that changed the way I understand wireless for the better. Lets walk though each of these idea's together!

I am currently finishing a project where I am designing a custom Quality of Service policy for a customer's suite of business critical applications. The customer uses MPLS as their WAN and the bandwidth for the MPLS is different depending on the site; Datacenters have more bandwidth, branches have decent bandwidth, and small kiosks only have a few megabits of bandwidth. The customer noticed that...

With the explosion of wireless technology we have experienced in the last few years, wireless networks are being asked to handled more and more demanding traffic. Between laptops, cell phones, and wireless IoT devices, the importance of having your wireless infrastructure optimized has never been greater.

We have all been there; sitting down to dinner on a Sunday night, when you get an alert that one of your branches has gone offline. You politely excuse yourself from the table, open your laptop and start troubleshooting. The problem, you can’t access any of the gear to troubleshoot the issue, and the gear you can access isn’t providing any answers to why the site went down. Now you are faced with...

In the modern networking world routing protocols fall into two distinct camps, Link-state and Distance Vector. Being a network consultant I often have customers asking me which routing protocol is better so I figure I would create a post comparing the different routing protocols.

What is Zero Trust? Zero Trust is a framework and attitude towards IT security that centers on the idea that we in the IT field cannot trust anyone or any device on our network. Many systems administrators are well versed in this model. Every employee is assigned a domain joined laptop that is locked down via Group Policy. Those employees are tracked via a user identity using their AD profile...

Last week was the long-awaited Cisco Live 2019! And two of our wonderful engineers wrote up their thoughts on the week. For a quick recap check out Dominic Zeni's overview of the week below and if you want a more in-depth recap check out Trevor Butler's deep dive into the Cisco Live 2019 World.

For the Short Attention Span Readers:

Another year, another Live!  Building Bridges was one of the...

Two years ago Cisco introduced the Catalyst 9000 series switches as the next generation of campus switches.  Every Catalyst switch family had an equivalent 9K to replace it; the 3800s were replaced with the 9300, the 4500s were replaced with the 9500, and the long standing 6500 chassis switches were replaced with the 9400.  Cisco was consolidating all Catalyst switches into the 9000 series,...