Consulting

If you’re having trouble or discomfort with any part of your network or infrastructure, or you just need some extra support getting projects done, I can help you.

Documentation - this is an area that is often pushed aside for more high-priority work; I can analyse your infrastructure, and help you to produce suitable documentation for it. I can also help you to implement strategies to ensure that documentation stays up to date as your infrastructure grows.

Infrastructure upgrades - if your infrastructure needs refreshing, I can help. Together we can design your dream network, and move towards it one step at a time. As your business' needs and budgets change, we can adjust the whole roadmap to fit.

Network visibility and monitoring - managing what you can’t see or measure is very difficult; having good visibility of the health and performance of your entire infrastructure is critically important. I can help you to choose and implement flow- or sample-based traffic analysis tools and monitoring tools with user interfaces and APIs to fit your environment, or help you enhance your existing ones.

Reliability - some parts of your network may be more susceptible to failure than others, and some failures matter more than others. I can help you to assess these risks, and put appropriate mechanisms into place to mitigate them. This might be adding multi-chassis link aggregation, checking up on and testing your IGP and EGP failure scenarios, modifying BGP policy via API based on triggers from your monitoring systems, or anything in between.

Checking for updates - vendors frequently release new software for their devices in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities, bug reports, and to add new features, and it’s easy to fall behind. I can help you update your network’s software with the least amount of downtime to your services, and to design processes to ensure software updates carry as small a risk as possible.

Testing and Validation - before you roll out a significant change to your infrastructure, I can help you to develop and execute a testing and validation plan to ensure that the changes achieve the goals you wanted.

Vendor Evaluation - every vendor will tell you that they’re the best. I can help you evaluate offers from multiple vendors to help you be confident that you’re making the right decision, and that your needs will be met.

Training

I can help you better understand your network, how to drive it and optimise it, monitor it, and what you can do with it. Together, we can figure out an appropriate training curriculum, custom fit to your current abilities and your needs and goals.

I will give you practical exercises, which we will walk through together. Questions are welcomed at every stage. Practical exercises will be complemented with theoretical materials and resources. Different people have different learning styles; some absorb information from reading materials, and some need to put it into practise to understand the reading. I fall squarely into the second group, so my training style reflects this. This doesn’t mean we will be skimping on the theory though; without a sound understanding of the why and how, we can’t build effective networks.

Hardware

I have partnered with several hardware vendors to ensure that I can provide my customers with the hardware that they need. I usually only sell hardware in conjunction with consulting, but if there’s something you’re after, just get in touch.

and a lot more!

• If your interest is piqued, or if you’d like to chat, please get in touch!
• Lots of information about my networking experience can be found in my CV.
• Book an appointment with me here