From the archives… A look back at over the last 17 years – part 1 – starting as a network engineer

Originally posted 2 June 2022

As I mentioned in my last post, I said I’d post a little retrospective of my 17 years in IT, so here is part one!

Back in 2005, I started to work for a company called, at the time, Atos Origin. I had applied to the Atos Origin Grad scheme in 2004, shortly after I finished Uni. After a multi-stage process I successful in getting a place starting, starting in September 2005. This gave me a bit of a gap, where I put some of my maths knowledge to do private tuition for a year before starting (something that gave me huge respect for teachers!).

I stared my Atos career in networking, working for the network project team in Birmingham. I recall one of my first tasks being given a Cisco 7200 router to build, at the time knowing next to nothing about what a Cisco 7200 was! Thankfully, I had a great team around me to teach me the ropes. This router ended up being part of a shared internet service that, as I recall, terminated a 155Mbps ATM link.  And as one does with a new toy we tried to do some speed testing on this link before hooking it up; although at the time we couldn’t get close to maxing it out from out laptops that only had 100Mbps ethernet ports! And now I am posting this from a 1Gbps symmetric home internet connection…

The first few years of my career were spent in this team, mostly working on what was a cutting edge shared networking platform, while also having the odd stint of crawling under data centre floors laying cables too! The concept of shared resources of course being the bedrock of today, but in 2005 was still quite novel! I had the opportunity to work across a great range of customers, both on shared platforms and dedicated builds; but more critically the opportunity to learn from some phenomenally talented people, working on cutting edge hardware and highly sophisticated and complex architectures.  There was also a chance to work with some very legacy stuff even back in 2005; there’s a clear memory of plugging a device in to a Token Ring MAU with a warning ‘if it clicks rapidly don’t panic’!

I think it was early 2008 when I first got involved with what today would be termed private cloud; a project to virtualise an EOL physical estate on to the newly released VMWare ESX 3.5. My role started at looking at the networking but also gave me the chance to take my VCP exam as well.  This was my first ‘taste’ of enterprise virtualisation and helped set the roadmap for the rest of my career; seeing the potential of taking tens of physical server down to a single blade, consolidating racks of devices in to a single blade chassis, while improving performance. It also didn’t go unnoticed that it wasn’t just about reducing servers to reduce servers, but also the carbon footprint – another element that is of course hugely important and increasingly more visible and key in decision making.

In 2009, the opportunity to work on the London 2012 Olympics came up, so I packed my bags down to London and started the next phase of my journey that would end up taking me half way around the world, but that’s for the next post!