Too Many Directions, Too Much to Think About

Too many dir­ec­tions at once

It’s been a busy time. I have been set­tling into a new con­sult­ing role as a Network Architect. Starting is always tough, there are a lot of new people and new polit­ics to under­stand. Plus the bur­den of under­stand­ing the pro­ced­ures because every busi­ness does the same thing dif­fer­ently (and no, I don’t under­stand how that is possible).

This role is almost purely a design and archi­tec­ture role. That means to receive the out­put from the Business Analyst (a work of fic­tion and guess­work that includes estim­ates on how much the pro­ject will cost) and turn it into a Detailed Design. The Detailed Design will then go to an engin­eer for implementation.

So far, nor­mal for most people who do this kind of work.

Diversity

Over the years, I have become com­pet­ent at writ­ing doc­u­ments, find­ing and com­mu­nic­at­ing with the vari­ous people, devel­op­ing a con­sensus for a design that is accept­able to everyone.

The thing that I am find­ing most chal­len­ging is the diversity of tech­no­lo­gies. This week has seen myself work­ing on pro­jects that have too many vendors and too many tech­no­lo­gies and my head can’t hold all the data. The fol­low­ing is an over­view of the tech­no­lo­gies /​ products I have been involved with this week:

• Blue Coat ProxySG, ProxyAV doing HTTP proxy, scan­ning and con­tent filtering.
• Cisco ACE load bal­an­cer deployment
• Packeteer traffic shaping
• BGP Site-​​of-​​Origin /​ EIGRP MPLS Site-​​of-​​Origin
• Nokia/​Checkpoint fire­walls to build a DMZ
• Cisco ASA /​ PIX fire­walls for the same DMZ.
• PVLANs for another DMZ, using trunks on mul­tiple switches with VMWare serv­ers. Meaning con­fig­ur­a­tion of Cisco switches, VMWare and the firewalls.
• cre­at­ing a new site includ­ing IP phones for a PABX over a IPSec VPN over Radio network.
• New VLANs/​SVI versus sec­ond­ary addresses

you get the idea, I am sure.

Its Detailed, alright

If I was work­ing on any one of these, I think I would be OK. But doing all of these in single week I am los­ing my abil­ity to com­plete designs. The point of pre­par­ing a Design Document is to cap­ture the detailed inform­a­tion like IP Addressing, VLAN num­bers as well as the big pic­ture that sets the busi­ness require­ments, and keep an eye on what prob­lem is so that pro­ject actu­ally deliv­ers a result.

A design has two parts — the cre­at­ive writ­ing part that cov­ers the busi­ness and pro­ject deliv­ery and tech­nical writ­ing part con­tains highly detailed and pre­cise inform­a­tion that the implment­a­tion team will need. I find that doing both of these is hard, espe­cially the cre­at­ive part.

I can be hap­pily work­ing on one design, only to take ques­tions on another —- instant brain wreck and con­cen­tra­tion loss.

Is there an CCIE angle to this ?

Well yes. One of the things that the CCIE exam taught me is how to func­tion with stuffed full head. Most men­dic­ants tell you about how their head is over­loaded and not sure how they will cope on exam day. For what it’s worth, I get that feel­ing most days. It doesn’t get any easier.

But the exam does teach you about your­self, and more or less, makes you find a way to cope with large amounts of diverse information.

And that is part of the reason that many suc­cess­ful CCIE’s go on to senior roles, and are at fore­front of new devel­op­ments in most com­pan­ies. Sure, tech­nical know­ledge and com­pet­ence is import­ant, but it’s not the only thing. The abil­ity to “grasp and men­tally hold” the entire net­work for a large com­pany, includ­ing the higher lay­ers such a Servers, Applications, Databases requires practice.

A good engin­eer knows tech­no­logy. But the men­tal dis­cip­line and prac­tice to gather, hold, sort that data, and then extract mean­ing from it and being able to com­pre­hend a wide range of tech­no­logy means you have a chance to be a great engineer.

I guess I’m still work­ing on it. Sigh.

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