Yesterday my work day started with a visit at Translink’s „data center“ at Belfast Central Station.
They have servers …
… networking equipment …
… and when it comes to structured cabling Translink strives for perfection! 😉
As you can see it’s rather a storeroom with a rack, some switches and an air conditioning system put in than a real data center.
I went there with my colleagues John and John, who both do most of the networking stuff at Translink. Why did we go there? The IS department just got a new redundant SAN system and plans are to move one part to Central Station to improve redundancy. To prepare this we met a network technician from Northgate (an IT service provider supporting Translink’s networking staff). He was introduced to Translink’s core network infrastructure with multiple sites connected via fibres and copper wires. After that he rushed through the core switch consoles, reviewed the configurations and presented some things that need to be changed in order to make the SAN replication work. We will get a full report soon.
The whole Translink data network is built on Cisco technology (as far as I know) so I hope there will be several opportunities to utilize my networking skills earned in the CCNA course in this (and coming) project(s).