[raides]

The excuse that the application grew faster than scalable is amateur hour. This entire article makes any true sys engineer cringe in their stomach.

You are ~100 million dollar company and it seems like you drew your systems architecture with crayons. The article is upsetting. The lack of segmentation is embarrassing.

"oh it's the switch's fault, it doesn't learn MACs fast enough" - actually you could subnet your racks and use f*n vlans. You might use public Ips on everything but this could still be educational for the company.

Your solution to all of this was to spend twice as much on a "staging" network. Something doesn't seem right here.

It makes me cringe when I see any one sentence that has the following three words in it: escalate, network, vendor.

This isn't a boeing airplane, you cannot just rely on the vendor. This article just gives me a good sense of job security in the field of sys engineering. I really think that they should sit down and really go over their network. A bridge loop like this for a company this large is pretty amateur. Github you can do so much better.

[nixgeek]

Since staging environments are often scaled down but functionally equivalent, it does not track that having one involves spending twice as much.

It is also nothing to do with the switch learning 'fast enough' and everything to do with the switch having a fault which entirely prevented it learning certain MAC addresses. Would you care to clarify how your solution (above) would help in this situation, and how you fix switch firmware issues without escalating to your vendor?