Nothing Like Building a Network

There’s nothing like actually building a network. Sure, architecting grand ideas is nice. Working with customers and business units to design solutions demonstrates the value we, as network engineers, can bring to an organization. And any good network engineer likes drawing a pretty picture with their favorite Cisco icons in Visio. But there’s nothing like taking all that design work and Visio files and making it work. To see your design come to life is what’s really exciting. Let’s be honest – what’s the fun designing and drawing a network to never build it? That’s no fun. You want to see your design (baby) come to life. I had that opportunity again last weekend. Despite working 15 hours on Saturday, it was a great experience. In those 15 hours we completely updated the network at one of our largest software development offices. On Friday we racked and prep’d, but Saturday was when the changes started. Saturday started by updating the console and monitoring tools we needed to do the work. Once that was done we were on to the first phase – building a separate lab network for the software developers. This lab network isolated their traffic from the corporate network. This protects the corporate network from the high bandwidth utilization inside the labs. We also delivered a private MPLS network for just the software engineers. This MPLS network, in a different VPN from our corporate MPLS network, is just between our software engineering sites. That allows the developers to blast traffic between development sites without competing with or impacting corporate traffic. All traffic destined or sourced from a lab network flows over this new MPLS network, even if one end of the connection is inside the IT network. All this is accomplished with BGP, no policy routing needed. It was a great thrill to see the traffic route correctly when the BGP neighbors established. Now, if that wasn’t enough for one day, we spent the second half of Saturday rebuilding the WAN module at the site. During this phase we installed a new Internet DS-3 and configured our BGP routing for dynamic failover. Now, if this lone Internet circuit fails, outbound Internet traffic fails dynamically over the corporate MPLS network to another hub site. All this is done with BGP. We tested the failover by disconnecting the loan Internet circuit. It took only 5 pings for the network to reconverge and route Internet traffic to the hub site. That made our day. By 11 PM we were done and everything was working well. However, the best part of the day wasn’t the network itself; it was the teamwork that made it happen. I was on-site with another IT manager. We had three other engineers on a conference call. From a cube at the site, I coordinated the changes, while the people on the phone verified everything. The IT manager – who made the biggest contribution during the install – was inside the DC patching cables and verifying connections. It was a great team effort, a great network design, and a great result. On Monday, there were no issues or complaints. You don’t get many days like that…even if it means working a Saturday.