Latest Posts

For a change of pace, this blog poses a thought exercise (teaser?), a small item I ran into while considering whether or not to use a vPC to connect a [...]

If you have slow applications, your DNS may be a contributing factor. This is a networking topic in that the network will of course get blamed. I ran across DNS and [...]

I’ve started blogging for Opnet at apmmatters.com, and the first posts are describing what happens to applications when faced with any of several types of network problems. I’ve previously written [...]

The Olympics have just started and this year NBC is streaming real-time events over the Internet in addition to the prime-time televised programming. Employees with computers and tablets and smart [...]

Converged networks typically require a higher availability metric than non-converged networks (there are exceptions, typically in the financial world). Five-nines is often referenced as the basic level of availability that [...]

VXLAN, or Virtual Extensible LAN, is a recent proposed standard technology from VMware and Cisco. It extends the concept of a VLAN in a manner that scales well for multi-tenant [...]

I’ve been blogging about Disaster Recovery, most recently about new techniques that might be used for BC/DR (Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery.  Prior blogs on the topic: The New Disaster Recovery [...]

What is the future of Disaster Recovery? That’s the obvious question after my blog on https://netcraftsmen.com/blogs/entry/improving-disaster-recovery.html. To recapitulate, that blog concluded that by doing datacenter basics well, we can help [...]

I have been working with a customer testing a pair of Nexus 5548s and dual-connected FEXes.  Here are a couple of our lessons learned.

NetCraftsmen recently received notification that we have completed all necessary requirements to achieve the Cisco TelePresence Authorized Technology Partner (ATP) status! This is great news and my whole team is looking forward to working more with the Cisco TelePresence solutions.

OTV Best Practices have come to the forefront lately. Various sites are starting to implement OTV. The ones I’m aware of to date are aware they are taking a minor [...]

In a nutshell: configure your DNS servers to only resolve addresses for the top (most popular) 1 million domain names. Any request for a domain that is in the top [...]