In the inaugural Network Vendor Diversity report, Auvik discovered high diversity in the network devices IT teams and MSPs were managing. In 2019, the data showed complexity continuing to rise as all categories became increasingly fragmented. In the 2020 edition, we look at the same four categories of managed network devices—access points, switches, routers, and firewalls—deployed across a sample of 30,000 networks, and compared the data to both 2018 and 2019.

There are two important protocols required to get your network to forward multicast packets: IGMP and PIM. In this article, I’ll show you how to set up these protocols on your network and how to troubleshoot them. PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) has two main versions called “dense-mode” and “sparse-mode.” There is also a “sparse-dense-mode,” which has features of both versions and is really just used to help to bootstrap a multicast network.

The cloud is here—and so are its acronyms. Since software as a service (SaaS) hit the world in 2001, the ‘as a service’ model has been extended to just about everything you can think of. Along the way, the definition has become a little muddied. It used to be that -aaS meant something delivered on a subscription basis via the cloud, without a physical component.