Week 3

Week 3 Objectives:

• Visit SunGard
• Continue working with Visio to organize the networking infrastructure of The Philadelphia Contributionship into a readable diagram
• Continue to become familiar with the networking infrastructure at the Fireman's Hall Museum
• Organize the infrastructure at the Fireman's Hall into a readable diagram through Visio
• Set up an appointment to shadow the network support team at The Philadelphia Contributionship
• Continue to update and revise The Fireman’s Hall Museum Technical Support Guide

Accomplishments:
This week I managed to accumulate 25 hours learning more about networking and the networking infrastructure at The Philadelphia Contributionship.  This week I visited SunGard down in Spring Garden with the infrastructure manager at The Philadelphia Contributionship.  He gave me a tour of his company's portion of network stored and managed at the data center.  I was extremely amazed by the immense complexity of the center.  It is a strict, highly monitored, security center because it houses the networks of a variety of large companies and these companies depend on the center for their network protection and security.  This is why there were a bulk of storage of routers and switches there at the site because they are the networks of these companies.  Aside from the vast amount of cased routers, switches, hubs, and wires that mainly stood out to me, the ventilation did as well because it was quite loud.  The purpose for the ventilation is the fact that because there are a tremendous amount of machines housed there, they produce lots of heat because they're always up and running.  Portions of the floor where these cased routers and switches were housed have cool air streaming from them which helps to maintain proper temperature levels of the systems.  This tour ultimately gave me a big picture on the complexity of networks and the devices used to provide and support them.  I enjoyed the fact that I could relate this tour back to one of my Information Science and Technology courses, Networking and Telecommunications, because in this course I used a program called TestOut and completed labs and tasks as an IT technician for a small corporate network working with routers, cables, switches, hubs, etc. that we had to use to troubleshoot the network.  After the tour, I had a better understanding of how networking works in the real world because I was able to view it from a smaller company's standpoint by seeing and learning about their infrastructure.  I organized more of what I learned into the flow chart diagram specifically made for the company through Visio.  As I have been continuing to learn more about the networking infrastructure at The Fireman's Hall Museum (which is a much smaller, local area network), I have started to organize a flow chart for their network as well through Visio and once complete, incorporate it into The Fireman’s Hall Museum Technical Support Guide.  I have been continuing to update the support guide this week as I have learned more about the network and systems and including small troubleshooting answers.  Last but not least, I was able to get the permission of the infrastructure manager who gave me the SunGard tour to set up an appointment with the networking team he manages at The Philadelphia Contributionship in order to shadow them for a day to see how they work to help support the network of the staff of the insurance company.