Network Engineer: Day In The Life

hi my name is steve ward i'm a network engineer at uh my company's healthstream um i'm going to talk to you today a little bit about kind of what i do during the day and what drove me to get here so that takes me back to kind of the 90s is when i was first introduced to computers and i think my excitement for technology and computers really comes from some of those early movies in the 90s and a lot of it kind of came from the hacker mentality and you know i wanted to learn how to program computers after deciding to program computers i went off to college and learned how to program computers and then i found myself getting a little uncomfortable with the idea of having to sit behind a desk all day and stare at a computer and write code so that's when i started hunting around to try to find other things in it that i could do um network engineering and wireless especially kind of peaked my interest so i looked into that and i found some things that i really liked one of the cool things that i find that i really love about networking is it's not all in front of the computer i get to spend time in front of the computer doing designs i get to spend time selecting and purchasing hardware and then i get to spend time on site talking to the the people that i'm supporting with my technology from there i get to go all the way through to actually being on site and physically building something that operates in our business so that leads me into what i think we're going to do today today i'm going to kind of take you guys around and show you some of the hardware i work with and show you how it all connects and show you how it leads to an end result we're going to be in lots of noisy air-conditioned rooms so i'm going to apologize for some of the noise in advance but i think this is cool stuff and i think this is the hands-on stuff that i never got when i was first learning i.t so here we are we're at the office this is the headquarters of my company and this is a brand new building for us so i spent a lot of time designing and architecting all of the it that goes into this office from a network perspective so today first thing i want to talk about is our wireless so up here you can see we've got access points these are called wireless access points there are 75 of these access points throughout this entire building i had to put it in to support wi-fi capabilities for both voice and video and regular internet access um a lot of that came down to trying to maintain continuity of signal as we went around the entire office and if you kind of walk around here you can see how this office has several different kind of nooks and crannies and all of these different places that we had to get wi-fi connectivity to in order to do that we had to really think through about how each type each one of these access points is able to connect with all of the devices so anywhere you walk in this building any device that you have at any point can see three of these access points as you walk around the building maintaining both triangulation for connectivity and triangulation for location finding each one of those access points and all of the other computers and phones that are plugged into wall outlets in this office all are cabled back to individual aggregation points that are filled with the equipment that i work on every day so right now i'm going to take you guys and i'm going to show you one of those aggregation points and all the other ones as well so find out in one of these closets this is called an idf closet right in here and here and here and here and over here and here and finally here in each of these intermediate distribution facilities we have network switches that serve as an aggregation point for all of the access points all of the computers and all of the phones in this office and here's an example of a network switch it's a very simple device essentially you plug something into one of these ports and they can talk to anything that's plugged into any of the other ports so your individual ports that are at your office desk or the access points that are in the ceiling or the phones that are plugged in are all ultimately end up plugged into one of these ports here once they're plugged into here each one of these are mapped up through fiber optic cables that go to a centralized hub that's called the main distribution facility that serves both as our primary aggregation point and our data center for this office and next i'm going to take you up there and show you that a little bit this is our mdf our main distribution facility and we're going to go and take a look here this is the main facilities of our network in this office this is three floors of networking uh it also has servers security firewalls all throughout it this is something that per my job i got to design from the servers that went in from the physical cabinets that went in here from the switches that went in all the way over here and i'll show you these two big units are giant air conditioning units to help keep all of this cool because all this equipment creates so much heat i got to spec design and help work with vendors to get these things installed as well so here is where all of those fibers map back to that are coming from those intermediate distribution facilities each one of those comes through here runs all the way through the floors and got through here comes over to here this is another set of switches much like the ones in our intermediate distribution facilities however these are much more powerful they have a lot more compute power and a lot more speed capabilities to them so these are going to run into these this is our distribution switch the distance distribution switch then connects into what we call our core switch here core switch acts as the centralized portion of all of networking in the entire building from there we connect to all of the other peripheral devices that support all of the infrastructure in the entire building some examples of those devices are right here these are our wireless controllers all of the wireless access points all talk to these controllers and they coordinate with each other to supply networks wirelessly to everybody in the building we also have firewalls these offer security to all of the connectivity at our office they are the wall or the barrier between us and the rest of the world it connects us to other offices for public internet and private connections to voice carriers as well so that's just a short glimpse of some of the cool hardware that i get to touch and work with on a daily basis and i get to put my effort towards designing and building and installing all of this equipment that hopefully gives everybody a better work experience at my company and other companies that work with me as well today you got to see something in it that's not necessarily behind a desk i know it was a big fear of mine going into it that i was going to be stuck working behind a desk all day i don't do that in networking i spend some time behind the desk i spend some time at the site working with people and i spend some time at the site working with vendors and helping to install this really cool equipment that i showed you today thank you

Channel: Greater Nashville Technology Council

Views: 28,117

Keywords:

Id: s27NzeMNHmk

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021