First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Nivon Silva, CCIE #19841. I work for a Brazilian company, which has been in the TCP/IP-Cisco market for the last 15 years. I am also a CCSI (Cisco Systems Instructor), being a tutor for hundreds of students and professionals during their certification and learning process. And by the way I’m only 32 all right, before some of you guys think I’m some sort of guru.
Well, in about two years ago I accepted my company’s offer to move to its office in Angola, a very promising country in Central Africa. My work here goes from the opportunity qualification to project implementation and post-implementation. In here a professional should participate in the whole project cycle. You just can’t afford to have a very distinct team because the costs to maintain such a team here are very high. You’re right; you will always be overloaded with work.
Most companies here are investing high in IT. And since most of them are basically building (or rebuilding) their network from scratch they are investing in the state of the art technology. And that’s when I start my magic here. I’ve been delivering Cisco technology since the very first day I got here. Yeah man, Cisco has a strong reputation here. Major companies truly rely its infrastructure on Cisco equipment. And boy, they love the 6500 Catalyst. I have implemented so many of them with all kind of modules you might think about. Not that I haven’t done it before, it’s that in here they really like this equipment.
One project I would very much like to mention is the one that I’ve done for an oil company in here. I have to mention that my company did not participate directly in this project. We were invited by another Angolan Company that was responsible for this project. This was a major network project spanning all areas: R&S, Security, Wireless mobility, Telephony. I played the role of field engineer and technical leader responsible for the R&S, Security and Wireless. Since IP Telephony is not one of my strong skills I had another colleague to take this part. The whole design project was made by another company, so I had to interact with them in order to put their ideas in place. Do I have to mention that all technology used in this project is Cisco’s? Ok, I do, and it is. Everything is Cisco and we had a lot of fun and some challenges. Unfortunately I had to spend a lot of time in endless meetings trying to figure out what the design team really meant when they designed the solutions. It’s not that it was complicated to implement, well It was, lol, I just couldn’t feature the benefit of it. I was just trying to make them see that we could achieve the scenario without that much of complication. And of course I was thinking about my client, they would be the one to take care of their network. Less complicated the better, but obviously including all the benefits that those very expensive products offer. One thing I have to admit, the design team was very professional. They do know what they were planning. If you guys are reading this, you know who you are, I am sorry for being such a pain, lol. The project consisted of 7600s, 6500s with lots of 10gbps Xen pack modules (what a cool name for a 10gbps module, XEN PACK), FWSMs, IDSMs, WLCs, WCS, MDS, Location Appliance, ACS, ASAs, WDS, BGP, EIGRP and Cisco Unified Communication. Am I forgetting something? Probably. As a technical leader I coordinated the implementation and gave technical support to my client and my team during the implementation process. I wrote and reviewed a lot of configuration scripts with my team and guided my client team as well, who took the responsibility to do most of the configuration, which I believe It was a cool thing, get involved into the network project for a network they will administer in the future. These guys are good and they will master their network. We had a tied schedule, but we were able to deliver it on time. The result: a fully converged network prepared to transport voice, video and data, a network that could adapt itself to network threats (and in the near future to unknown threats, more projects coming up baby) and also dynamically choose the optimum paths within its internal network and to the Internet.
Let me finish with this one. There is a bombastic huge Cisco network in one of our clients here, a multinational construction company with more than 5000 Cisco IP Phones (estimate) and that only in Angola. I had lots of fun (yeah, I have fun with my job) working with this client. I did all kind of network/security work at this client. From optimizing their routing environment to implementing an access policy through IOS FW Feature into their 7200s and creating a lot of subinterfaces into their ASA Firewall. I blocked a lot of P2P traffic, I hope end users there never get to know me. Recently, I implemented a WDS (Wide area Data Services) project there in an attempt to optimize their satellite WAN links. The results were great (after the problems were solved, of course) and we were having a great feedback from end users. I hope I can be remembered for optimizing their traffic, not for blocking it. This network is administered by some very cool guys, and one of them is a very cool buddy of mine, which recently passed his CCIE lab, well done mate, you had the best practice lab one guy could dream of. Just kidding man.
I had lots of other projects I would very much like to mention here, but I’m afraid Eman might cut me out here. lol. Since I got here, I had the privilege to interact with a lot of network professionals from all around the globe. Scottish, Americans, South Africans, Portuguese, Chinese, South Koreans, Pakistanis and obviously Angolans. It’s an interesting multiethnic environment where you can learn a lot from everybody. Yeah, and you can even have a beer later on. Luanda the capital of Angola is a very nice place, it has a beautiful island where you can feel the breeze coming from the Atlantic and drink a cold beer with some tasty sea food.
I would just like to thank Eman for this opportunity. I am very honored. I am sorry if I bored you guys. God bless.Nivon Silva