Keeping an up-to-date network inventory is essential for network efficiency, especially given current networks changing dynamics. The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a network discovery tool, which assists network administrators and engineers in identifying neighboring Cisco devices, particularly those running lower-layer, transparent protocols.

The idea for server virtualization technology was originally conceived as a means to reduce costs through software consolidation. Looking back it seems like a pretty obvious solution, but at the time this was revelatory. Instead of running each individual workload on a separate physical server, unused hardware capacity was now able to be used to run a number of workloads at the same time as virtual machines.