Introduction to Enterprise Network Infrastructure

Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Ross Bagurdes, and welcome to my course, Introduction to Enterprise Network Infrastructure. I am a network engineer with more than 20 years' experience building enterprise networks and teaching people about them. Data networks use specialized hardware to move data from one point to another. Most hardware is designed to achieve a very specific task, so in this course we'll examine data networking hardware and its purpose, including wireless access points, cabling and its standards, routers, switches, as well as virtualized hardware. By the end of this course, you'll understand the purpose of different types of network cables, what a load balancer is and why we need it, as well as why we use metro Ethernet instead of T1 connections for modern WAN links. This course builds upon the content in Introduction to Networking and, upon completion, will allow you to move onto the third of five courses in this series, Network Management and Operations. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn network infrastructure with the Introduction to Enterprise Infrastructure course, at Pluralsight.

Wireless Technologies
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This course is Introduction to Enterprise Network Infrastructure. If you're uncertain what enterprise network infrastructure means, what we're talking about here is the equipment that's required in a mid- to large-size organization that's needed in order to make network communication possible, meaning in order for your desktop or your laptop computer, your tablet, or maybe even your smartphone to be able to connect to a network in a larger organization, we need these devices and these systems in place in order to allow that to happen. We're going to start off this conversation about enterprise network infrastructure by talking about wireless networks. Our goals this module will be to review the OSI model as I usually do, just so we can find out what layer we're talking about when we're working with wireless. We're going to talk about the basics of wireless, including some of the physics of it, we'll look at what is a wireless channel and what's that composed of, then we'll move onto the 802. 11 protocols. Now 802. 11 was designated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers as the protocol number designation for all things wireless Ethernet. We're going to look at some of the hardware and some of the components that make 802. 11 work, and then we're going to take a brief look at some of our cellular wireless network options.

Physical Layer Technologies
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. In this module, we're going to look at Physical Layer Technologies. Our goals this module are to look at a couple things. We're once again going to of course review the OSI model and find out what layer we're looking at and how it's relevant. We're going to look at the physical layer medium options. Now a medium here is the physical stuff that we use in order to send a signal of information. We're going to look at copper cabling then and see what options we have there. We'll take a look at fiber optics and understand the terminology and properties of those physical layer technologies. We're then going to look at Ethernet designations and the physical layer technology that's related to them.

WAN Technologies
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This next module we're going to talk about WAN Technologies. This is wide area networking. Our goals this module will be to look at what internet service providers can offer us for services. We'll look at some copper wide area network options including the T1 or E1. We'll see what that is and how it works. We'll look at some home internet options. We'll look at optical carriers, which is something that telcos use in their businesses. And then last, we'll wrap this up by looking at what metro Ethernet is and see how it's becoming probably the most important wide area networking technology that we have in modern networks.

Network Devices and Appliances
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This next module we're going to discuss network devices and appliances, and we're going to look at it at each layer of the OSI model. So we're going to start down at the physical layer and look at the devices that we have available there, and then move our way up the OSI model to the data link layer, network layer, transport layer, we're of course going to skip the presentation and session layer, and go right up to application layer devices that you will find in a data network.

Introduction to Virtualized Hardware
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. Let's introduce some virtualized hardware. Now virtualized hardware is becoming the norm in data networking and computing in general, so let's take a look at what virtualized hardware is and how it came to be so popular. It really is almost the introduction to cloud computing as well, which is actually the very next module we're going to tackle. For this one, the goals that we have here is we're going to talk about the need for virtualized hardware. I'm going to tell you a story of my experience working at a large hospital and how we ended up virtualizing our entire datacenter and really saving the day when it comes to our datacenter needs and the ability to serve our users in an organization. We're going to look at the components to a virtual datacenter and explain how some of that works. We're going to look at what the storage needs are for a virtualized datacenter and some of the protocols we use to connect up storage. And then last, we're going to do a very brief demonstration looking at a virtualized platform called VMware ESXi.