Below is a description of projects, assignments and other activities undertaken in the course of my employment. Where possible, images have been included to help illustrate the scope of the project.

Data Center

The Columbus data center consists of two geographically separate locations connected by redundant OC-12 Ethernet hand-offs. The two locations are logically bound together into a single switch fabric which allows the two sites to be presented to the business as a single data center.

Between the two sites, there are two MDFs which are dedicated to server hosting and a single core which hosts servers as well as WAN, VPN, third-party and Internet connectivity. Each of the two host MDFs consist of two Cisco Catalyst 6513 layer 2 Ethernet switches and the core MDF consists of a total of four dual-supervisor Catalyst 6513 layer 3 Ethernet switches running HSRP for high availability. The routing protocol at the core is OSPF using fast Hellos. The connectivity to the WAN, which hosts 80+ call centers across the U.S. is handled by a pair of dual-homed 7206 routers connected to an MPLS network running BGP as a routing protocol. Internet connectivity is on another pair of 7206 routers, each with a 50-Meg Ethernet hand-off from different providers, also running BGP. Firewall functions are handled by a pair of Cisco PIX 525 firewalls running in high availability mode. VPN connectivity to the field is handled by one of two solutions, depending on the hardware deployed. The first solution is a second pair of Cisco PIX 525 firewalls running in high availability mode terminating tunnels for remote Cisco 831 and 871 routers. The second solution is two autonomous Fortinet 310B firewalls terminating tunnels for Fortinet 60 firewalls deployed in the field. Redundancy between the two Fortinet firewalls is handled by weighted static routes on the remote end and OSPF on the head-end. VPN connectivity for telecommuters and individuals traveling is handled by a pair of Juniper SA6000 SSL VPN appliances.

Network Monitoring

Designed, installed and configured a pair of servers to monitor the health and reachability of the different elements of the enterprise data network.

The first server monitors the more mission-critical data network servers and the data network devices in the corporate offices, data centers and 80+ call centers across the United States. It monitors a total of 377 discrete network elements and a total of 1,256 different services provided by those elements. Some of the services monitored include:

• Element uptime

• Interface status (up, down, dormant, backup)

• Power supply status

• Temperature

• BGP peer status (the number of BGP peers in an established state should equal the number of peers in the router configuration).

• Disk utilization

• Memory utilization

• Database access

• RAID status

• 146 public-facing DNS zones on master and slave DNS servers not only exist, but also verify the serial number on each zone is the same on both master and slaver servers

The second server monitors the broadband-connected devices deployed to the field which the business considers less than mission-critical. This includes a total of 294 stores and a total of 1,250 services. The stores are connected to the remainder of the enterprise network using VPN tunnels over broadband. In some cases, the network equipment uses a secondary VPN path over a cellular network in the event he broadband path goes down. In these cases, the cellular connectivity is also monitored for reliability.

Both servers send out email alerts on up/down reachable/unreachable events. The first server is outfitted with a directly-attached cellular device which it uses to send alerts by SMS pages directly to cellular phones in addition to email alerts. This allows it to alert staff “out of band” so that even if the connectivity to the Internet were down, the monitoring server would still be able to communicate network events.

Both servers also monitor each other so that in the event one of the servers fails, a loss of insight into the health of the network can be minimized.

West Coast Distribution Center

In 2009, a distribution center was built and opened in California. The purpose of this center was to receive goods manufactured outside the United States for distribution West of the Mississippi River. The site consists of a modest office housing approximately 20 individuals who require standard access to the corporate network, including the IP-enabled phone system. It also consists of 282,000 square feet of warehouse space designed to store 150,000 windshields and other pieces of auto glass. The office space is outfitted with traditional cabled facilities for PCs and phones. The entire facility is blanketed with 802.11 wireless coverage which provides service to the hand-held and forklift-mounted bar code scanners used for inventory in the warehouse. Cisco LWAPP was the wireless infrastructure deployed. The wired infrastructure designed to support the wireless network consists of 4 IDF Ethernet switches connected together with the MDF office switch with a ring of fiber to provide a layer of resiliency in the event of a single element failing.

East Coast Warehouse

In 2008, a pair of warehouses was opened in North Carolina to augment the existing warehouse which is co-located with the manufacturing plant. The new warehouses required wireless connectivity to hand-held and forklift-mounted bar code scanners used for inventory management. The wired infrastructure deployed consists of and MPLS-connected router and Ethernet switches in each building connected by trenched fiber between the buildings. The wireless infrastructure consists of a total of 30 Cisco access points running autonomous Cisco IOS and managed independently.

Site Relocations

Due to business growth and acquisitions over the past several years, many of the company's smaller, market-specific warehouses and call centers were simply too small. As a result, the business made a decision to relocate the majority of the 80+ call centers and warehouses to larger facilities. Specific planning and coordination was key to implementing each move without disruption to the business function. In each instance, provisioning of data services, hardware and cabling for the new location was performed well in advance, often times during the construction of the new facility. On the day of the relocation, staff simply reported to the new facility and began work as normal. It was often imperative to provide a fully functional network based on a strict time line so as to avoid additional costs as the sites were relocated according to their lease expirations.

East Coast Distribution Center

Like the West Coast Distribution Center, a second distribution center was built on the East Cost in 2010. A larger version of the West Cost Distribution Center, this location services the Continental US East of the Mississippi River. The office area consists of both wired and wireless infrastructure while the 300,000+ square foot warehouse is primarily wireless using controller-based wireless technologies in both the 2.4-GHz and the 5-GHz spectrum.