Silvano Gai, who grew up in a small village near Asti, Italy, has more than 27 years of experience in computer engineering and computer networks. He is the author of several books and technical publications on computer networking as well as multiple Internet Drafts and RFCs. He is responsible for 30 issued patents and 50 patent applications. His background includes seven years as a full professor of Computer Engineering, tenure track, at Politecnico di Torino, Italy and seven years as a researcher at the CNR (Italian National Council for Scientific Research). For the past 13 years, he has been in Silicon Valley where in the position of Cisco Fellow, he was an architect of the Cisco Catalyst family of network switches, of the Cisco MDS family of storage networking switches, and of the Nexus family of data center switches. Silvano teaches a course on the topics of this book at Stanford University.