Today's state-of-the-art enterprise networks follow a distributed architecture that provides a high degree of reliability in most instances. These networks, however, have limitations in their ability to function in certain catastrophic conditions. In this paper, we provide a detailed study of a recent systemic network outage that affected Clemson University's enterprise network to show the shortcomings of the distributed Internet architecture. Of particular note are the LAN spanning tree implementations, access control list implementations, and redundancy protocols. The observations shed light on opportunities where the emerging software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm may help avoid such difficult situations through a centralized control plane.
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