Redundancy and Loop Avoidance

By Dan DiNicolo, May 25th, 2006 Posted in CCNA Study Guide Chapter 03. Subscribe to our RSS Feed

When designing a switched or bridged network, you’ll almost certainly need to consider redundancy. While network redundancy is a great idea in principle, there are issues that you’ll need to be aware of. The biggest issue is that bridging redundancy exposes networks to a loop, and loops cause major problems if not dealt with properly.

The problems associated with network loops go back to the days when bridging was the primary way of segmenting a LAN. The idea was to have more than one bridge connecting two segments, in order to provide a redundant path should a link or bridge fail. The problem with having this redundancy in a bridged environment is that may create loops, and network loops are capable of causing communication problems. In the case of a bridging loop, a network becomes susceptible to broadcast storms.

In this section you’ll notice that I tend to refer to bridges instead of switches. The main reason is that a bridged network is easier to diagram that one using switches. For all intents and purposes, when describing loops the terms bridge and switch can be used interchangeably.

Written by Dan DiNicolo - Visit Website

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