Greetings everyone,   My name is Ethan and I am slightly new to routing and switching in the broadcast industry. I want to make my network fault tolerant but optimized for audio transmission. In my research, I am pretty sure I need to remove all loops, disable RSTP, and I think link aggregation should be implemented but, am not confident on the actual implementation. Would I just link aggregate to the next switch, like a bus topology? I found some switch stacking cables and I am thinking of possibly using those as well. My network is meraki based, I have 4 main switches, and 1 inside a studio. I also have 2 of the mx250's and want to integrate them both for high availability. Any guidance / experience sharing would be awesome. Thank you. ... View more

Greetings everyone, I need some advice on best practices when working with multicast. We are upgrading our audio routing distribution system and it is centered around multicast. I work at a radio network and we can't afford more than a 30 second outage. The upgrade is going to introduce 3 new switches (for 3 studios) into our network (possibly meraki or catalyst, not sure which yet) but I would like some advice on what people have found to make the multicast traffic highly available. Should I implement RSTP? is there a preferred topology? Is there an edge to using meraki switches over catalyst 2960's? I found a page https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/ios-nx-os-software/multicast-enterprise/whitepaper_c11-474791.html that shed a little light on this but wanted to reach out to the community.   ... View more