CCIE Practical Studies: Security (CCIE Self-Study)

Switching Overview

Switches were originally developed to work at the most fundamental layer of your network. They were designed to give your users the ability to send information over a network at the same time without slowing each other down when compared to a network composed of hubs. Today's switches are blurring the line between switches and routers. Just like routers, which allow different networks to communicate with each other, today's switches not only allow different nodes on your network to communicate directly with each other, but some are also able to route between networks without the use of a router.

In the next sections, you learn about a LAN switch and how transparent bridging works. You also learn about VLANs, trunking, and spanning ...