Cisco Networks

The book I read to research this post was Cisco Networking All in One for Dummies by Edward Tetz which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Cisco have 4 major class of networking product. There’s enterprise class which is for large networks & the increased capabilities of these products is reflected in the price. Incidently  Cisco holds the world record for having the most powerful router in the world. Then there are small medium business products these are obviously for smaller networks & they carry the Cisco name. Then there are Linksys small medium business products, these are cheaper but that is reflected in the capabilities & quality. Linksys was purchased by Cisco a while ago & made lower end networking equipment, eventually these will carry the Cisco badge but in the meantime they are branded Linksys. Then come the home products which are the cheapest, they also carry the Linksys brand name. A lot of the higher end products need Cisco iOS which is a brand specific operating system. Two programs often used for identifying what is on a Cisco network are Cisco Works which is a $10,000 for upto 300 workstations program & the free & easier to use Cisco Web Console. A free program often used for mapping networks is Nmap & its windows version Zenmap. When they’re administrating a wireless network a lot of administrators use wireshark which analyzes information packets.

CCNA

The book I read to research this post was CCNA for Dummies by Silviu Angelescu which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. If like me you have no intention of taking the CCNA exams this book is still a great introduction to cisco networking. CCNA stands for certified cisco network associate & for those interested in taking the exams I’ll write a bit about that. The CCNA is the entry level to cisco certifications. To pass you must acheive 85% & has 3 major components which are internet telephony, wireless networking & storage networks. There’s some questions that are multi choice & have 1 answer, some with more than 1 answer & questions that you have to write a brief answer to. When you pass the exam you are certified for 3 years & then must either retake the exam or take a higher exam like CCDA. CCNA is more general in its syllabus whereas the higher exams focus more on cisco product knowledge. Cisco leads the world in products like routers & switches.

Storage Area Networks

The book I read to research this post was Storage Area Networks for Dummies by Christopher Poelkin which is an excellent book which I got from kindle. Storage Area Networks or SANS are networks where basically the back ups are stored. They use modular arrays which are repositories for the hard drives on largish networks the hard drives are stored in one place. Switches are used to direct the data and a network of switches is called a fabric. Director class switches are very expensive and even basic switches are quite pricey. One issue in SAN’s is that ideally you should just stored the data that has changed but a lot of companies store their data over and over again and some even store their applications over and over. When your data can be huge this is a very serious issue the more data you have the more it costs to store it. Often a RAID array is used to store the data this is useful if a hard drive fails.

Cisco Networking

The book I read to research this post was Cisco Networking for Dummies by Ron Gilster and it’s a very interesting book.  Cisco is a company that makes high end network  devices like enterprise class routers. They have their own exams which are very product specific. In fact if you look at any large network it will almost certainly have some cisco devices. Networks come in three sizes Local Area Network, Campus Area Network and Wide Area Network with WAN being the biggest. Cisco also make software like the Cisco IOS which stands for Interoperability Operating System. Cisco IOS helps your server work with the cisco devices.