Experience and Credentials

Contact Information

About Me

I am a Technical Solutions Architect working at Cisco for the America’s Partner Organization. Previously, I worked for Cisco CX to help a major financial institution upgrade their network to SD-WAN.

Ivan Pepelnjak wrote an excellent piece On I-Shaped and T-Shaped Skills which highly influenced what I focus on in my career. I enjoy classical “routing and switching” which is why I worked to obtain skills to the expert level in that area. Yet, I am constantly learning and rounding out my skill set in other areas as well, such as service provider technologies, automation and network programmability, wireless, cloud computing, datacenter technologies, and more.

To round out my business-oriented skills, I achieved an MBA degree from WGU in 2021.

I was a member of the Cisco Champion program for 2019, and I participated in GestaltIT’s Networking Field Day 19.

Experience

  • While working on a massive global enterprise network, I developed engineering scripts for junior engineers to implement. I also developed automations in Python to manipulate data via APIs, SQL databases, and spreadsheets. These automations represented an estimated 90% or better time-savings in manual labor and dramatically reduced human error.
  • I designed and integrated a VeloCloud-based SD-WAN environment to migrate away from a 400-site MPLS L3VPN WAN. This included a 15-site trial/PoC environment from one provider, followed by a full production rollout using a different provider. During the migration phase, there were two separate MPLS L3VPNs, two separate SD-WAN environments, two datacenters, and 400 sites supported simultaneously. I used BGP at the datacenters and various kinds of filtering and BGP policy adjustments to harmoniously stitch all of the environments together for full connectivity between all sites.
  • I designed and implemented the network portion of an enterprise disaster recovery plan (similar to but slightly more complex than my post Easy Disaster Recovery Plan ). This included segregating production and DR traffic with VRFs and BGP filtering.
  • I participated in the networking aspects of moving an in-house datacenter to a colocation facility and detailed the aspects of maintaining connectivity between the old and new datacenters during the migration and lessons learned during the process. This includes working with Cisco’s Nexus datacenter series switches running NX-OS.
  • I passed the Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching written exam, and later attempted the lab exam (twice). I gained many skills that go far above and beyond the CCNP level, including multicast, QoS, and MPLS experience (both enterprise and service provider sides). As part of my study, I released to the public some of the study materials I had created for myself, including a deep, detailed mind-map, a collection of documentation links based on topics, and a collection of nearly 3500 flash cards.
  • I was selected for the Cisco Champions 2019 program and a finalist for the Cisco 2018 IT Blog Awards

Credentials

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