Blog for Technologists

Have you noticed that “active-active” has gotten over-used in networking? Not to mention, used inappropriately? The industry could use a little more accuracy in terminology, and perhaps candor, around the [...]

Will new network protocols improve the net? What will it take for any of them to gain acceptance? Do we really need new network protocols? The short answer is yes. Sure, [...]

How do you build a global SD-WAN leveraging Cisco Viptela routers and Equinix Performance Hubs? This blog describes a generic approach, informed by some ongoing design work. My intent is [...]

You may have noticed that NetCraftsmen does various types of assessments (network, security, etc.). One of the things I have noticed in doing them is that customer operational practices differ [...]

For a while now, I’ve been mulling over how to tell if interfaces are overloaded in a good automated way. Staring at 1000 interface utilization graphs is not efficient. How [...]

In order to troubleshoot a unified communications system, IT leaders should have a written list of common problems and a description of how to resolve those issues. A quality unified [...]

As you move real-time applications to the cloud, you might relinquish some network control. However, several mechanisms are available to monitor application performance. In general, with real-time applications, a person [...]

A recent blog contrasted routers and switches. This blog contains some related thoughts and is essentially Part 2 of the prior blog. In some recent design situations, I’ve spent some [...]

The easiest way to record a greeting on a call handler in Cisco Unity Connection is to use the Greetings Administrator, but access to it requires some setup.  One thing [...]

Latency, congestion and sluggish TCP stacks can plague application performance, but understanding data center interconnect technologies is key.  What factors influence the performance of a high-speed, high-latency data center interconnect? Redundant [...]

Giving yet another nod to the ever-expanding world of security on Cisco equipment, we’re now looking at how to set up secure SIP trunks and secure hardware conferencing using a [...]

In a prior blog, I covered Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) Fabric. If you’re asking, “what’s an Equinix?”, please see the prior blog. In that blog, we saw that Equinix can [...]