I recently had the opportunity to test out and implement some of the top WAN optimization products on the market today. I was amazed at the science behind these awesome devices and how they were able to “speed” up long distance data transfers.
WAN Optimization has been a bit of a buzz word for the [...]

Today we review the Cisco ASA 5500 series firewall/vpn/ips/security device.  For those who don’t remember the Cisco ASA series is the replacement for the PIX as well as the VPN concentrator.  Along with the new line of ISR routers, Cisco is moving swiftly on all fronts to devices that can serve in multiple areas [...]

MPLS in the DataCenter? According to Juniper, they say “HECK YEAH!” and I can totally see why. Most data centers have a nicely redundant, fully meshed switching architecture. Most host servers are multi-homed (or connected to two separate switches for redundancy) and the access layer switches are multi-homed to the core to provide [...]

I recently had the opportunity to completely over haul the DNS for a large IT organization. The internal DNS would remain on Windows Active Directory servers however the public facing external DNS servers that had been running on Sun Solaris needed to be updated.
My choices were to either upgrade the existing Sun hardware, implement [...]

Recently I was on a project to upgrade our current Cisco 6509 core switches and came across some new changes to the Cisco 6509 chassis.
The switches that were being upgraded were just doing basic switching duties, populated with Sup II’s in Slot 1 and primarily had 10/100/1000 switching module scattered throughout.
The plan was to [...]

Today I’m going to review Plixer’com’s netflow analyzer called Scrutinizer. Scruntizer is a free, yes you heard that right, FREE netflow analyzer for your Cisco router.
Wikipedia defines Netflow as:an open but proprietary network protocol developed by Cisco Systems to run on Cisco IOS-enabled equipment for collecting IP traffic information.
Some of the data that can [...]