CCIE Practical Studies: Security (CCIE Self-Study)

Spanning Tree Overview

As your business requirements place more emphasis on network availability and as your end users depend more on the network to accomplish their everyday tasks, redundancy becomes a major component of the network infrastructure.

One of the most important protocols required to make a redundant network infrastructure operate efficiently is the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). In the early days of networking, it was discovered, through trial and error, that only one active path can exist between any two stations in a network. When multiple active paths are present, switches can see stations on multiple ports. This results in loops in your network topology. If you were to imagine a large oak tree, you would picture something with ...