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My Network Skills

Although I am trying to break into into the DevOps, automation and IaC space, particularly with projects like this website, my professional heart lives still between Layers 2 and 4. I love seeing IGP neighbor relationships come up and routes propagating from a remote site into the DC and the newly installed node turning green on the moitoring system.
This is where I have spent the mojority of my career and where I have the most experience. Throughout my carreer I've been lucky enough to have been involved and responsible for a long list of projects during which I've learned a great deal about of foundational technologies, but have also been debugging very specific use case scenarios.




Core network

Starting off on Nortel 8600s and Cisco Catalyst 6509s across two OnPrem DCs in 2003, I've been deeply involved in their replacement with Cisco Nexus euipment in 2012 and finally moved to Dell OS10 Spine / Leaf architecture in 2020 while migrating all onPrem services into two Colo DataCentres.



Edge network

This has been bread and butter work for me with countless, quite standard L2 deployments and replacements of Edge Switches in various locations throughout sites across Europe (Ireland, UK, IoM and Germany). In 2024 we have embarked on a journey into the world of Software defined Access as part of the refurbishment of our Head office in Dublin in which I am the technical lead from a network point of view.



WAN Technologies

Connecting sites around the world to each other has probably been my favourite area of Networking over the years. We have started off in 2007 with a leased line MPLS underday with IPsec tunnels in an hub an spoke topology, moved on to an L2 WAN with a GET VPN fully meshed network on top of it and recently migrated all our sites in Europe to Cisco SDWAN. For the latter two solutions I've been the architect and lead engineer.



Software defined networks

For probably 10 years (since about 2014) I have had contact with Software defined networking. Intrestingly it started off in a Startup that build their own SDN environment based on virtualized BSD nodes. More recently I've been the technical lead on the European wide SDWAN deployment and am currently doing the same role for the SD Access roll out of our headquarter in Dublin for approximately 1400 staff as well as multiple dedicated Virtual networks with vairous requirements for IoT, BMS and AV equipment.
During our Data Center Migration we have also chosen VMware NSX-T for our Software defined DataCenter and HCI solution. I've been working on the deployement of the original infrastructure and have been maintaining it since then.
Over the last 2 years I have also enjoyed significant exposure to Microsoft Azure networking concepts as part of our migration (or at least expansion) into the Cloud.
Since Software defined Networking is absolutely a dircection where we are heading in a lot of aspects of Networking, I've a dediciated section for this over here