Today's episode of Telemetry Now is all about something very near and dear to my heart - state, local, and education networking, better known as SLED.
Now I spent maybe six or seven years working for a couple of VAR in the northeast US that focused on mainly SLED projects. And so I had the opportunity to help schools, mostly k through twelve, though some colleges and universities as well, with all sorts of networking projects ranging from pretty basic switch refreshes all the way to very complex networking projects with overlays and integrated systems and mission critical services.
It really was an awesome opportunity for me personally to get exposed to a lot of technology as I went from project to project.
So today, we have Jason Ginter, CTO at Lake Tech in Ohio, as well as Philip Wightman, presales and post sales engineer also at Lake Tech, focusing on a variety of projects for sure, but doing plenty of SLED work, especially now that we're getting into the summer months.
So what's different about networking in SLED? What are the more important drivers? What are the main technologies that folks are focusing on? How do budgets work? There's a lot to talk about today. My name is Philip Gervasi, and this is Telemetry Now.
Jason and Phil, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm really excited about this, this episode primarily because I spent so many years as an engineer both, post sales and presales doing this kind of work that we're gonna be talking about today, SLED.
So I'm really I'm really jazzed to be talking to you guys about it, especially because you're still in the weeds, and I've been doing this whole technical marketing thing for, like, five years now. So little bit detached. So thank you so much. Welcome. And and good to meet you, Phil, for the very first time.
Alright. So, I love your name, by the way. Very cool. Except that I spell Philip with two l's, and I see that you spell it with only one.
Not everybody can do it right? Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I know mine is the more unusual spelling, but I'm actually named after my grandfather.
And, my my name is actually Filippo, which is, Italian for Philip, but, we we say Philip in in the United States. Anyway and then, Jason, it's good to see you again. You've been on a couple of times now with me, so it's great to have you on and give you your perspective or get your perspective rather. And if you don't mind, I'd like to start with you really quick. A really quick rundown of your background and also your role now. You know, I get all of the LinkedIn updates as, as we do, and I and I see that you are in a relatively new position, at a at a at a regional bar similar to the one that I was with for some years.
Yeah. Thanks, Phil. It's good to be on again.
Yeah. So I took a role at a place called Lake Tech here in Cleveland, Ohio. And, it it it was a it's a little bit of of what I was doing before as far as, you know, integration work, professional services, managed services, hardware resale, but a little bit of a of a of a different slant. And I think that's what we're gonna be talking about today is is our focus on on SLED. And, you know, for those that that are unaware, SLED's, is state and local, and education.
It's, you know, kind of working with with state and local governments, working with schools, k through twelve, higher ed, etcetera. So it's actually I you know, I've worked with with some higher ed in the past, but the whole working with with, with local schools is is kinda new to me. So that's why I I got my wingman, Philip, here to to back me up and and, talk about that. But I started at Lake Tech, you know, back back in April, and it's been it's been a, a great ride.
It's really rewarding work, and I really love what I'm doing here. So, my role is CTO, so, helping lead the technical vision here as far as, you know, our automation. And I'm sure we'll get into these topics about, you know, the importance of of those sorts of things in because you've got these really compressed deployment time frames and things like that. When you're talking about schools, they have limited limited time to get things done.
But, yeah, really excited to, be here today. And, again, thanks thanks for having us on.
Oh, of course. So, Phil, really quick, I'd like to get a quick rundown of your background. I know you're the you're the guy that turns the virtual and physical wrenches.
I understand. You're still in the field as an engineer. Right?
I am. Yeah. I I kinda start a lot of stuff. So, yeah. So I've been in IT for coming up on thirty years now.
It's crazy because, you know, I I knew you're gonna ask me that question. I calculated the math real quick. I'm like, man, I'm coming up on thirty years in IT. So, yeah, I started in my teens.
So I started started nice and young. Always been interested in the computers, but, you know, doing everything from starting out with the s four hundreds to desktop support to, taking over n t four o back in the day in active directory.
And then I realized that I really like communications and Philip flipped up to networking. So did that about fifteen years ago. So half my career now have been in networking, specifically, you know, route switching wireless. I specialize in wireless. I technically specialize in wireless and knack now. But I've been, you know, working for some big enterprises. Well, I call them big.
Grand scheme of the world. I don't know how big they are.
Right. Yeah.
But, yeah, worked for, Cleveland Clinic here in Ohio for, a good few years. You know, we had about, thirteen thousand access points there, over a hundred controllers. So large organization to really shine your, you know, shine your skills sharpen your skills, you know, with wireless. And then, I I started Lake Tech about ten years ago. And now I'm sitting on the other side of the table as a VAR, you know, in a VAR capacity doing presales and post sales.
So I I majority do presales.
But, yeah, when I when needed, I kick in and I do the post sales and, you know, feed on the street and, you know, do some deployments. I'm actually just wrapping one up for this week in a Slack environment.
Yeah. Absolutely. And and have you been focused on a SLED for for your time at Lake Tech?
Oh, it's no. It's it's all over. So health care, you know, we've got a couple big hospitals.
University, is huge, and we we were discussing that earlier. You know, that fits in the sled. So we have a lot of universities we take care of here in Ohio as well as, a ton of k through twelve. I'd say that's a majority of, you know, what I'm involved in, but it's it's really everything. Small business, medium, large.
So, again, just to reiterate what Jason said, SLED is well, it stands for state, local, and education. And what we mean by that is, you know, like like the local town library and police stations and small cities typically. So when I say state and local, I'm not necessarily talking about, you know, gigantic, gigantic projects, although it could be. Where I live, yes, we did some state of New York projects that kind of fits under the umbrella of SLED. Right? Well, I mean, it does officially because of the word state.
But when I talk to folks about SLED, when I think about SLED, it really does lean a lot more toward the education piece. And then when I say education, for me at least, more on the k through twelve. So your, you know, school districts. And I live in New York, so it's the school districts as well as the school district cooperatives, which we call, BOCES.
And so they they work together to pool resources. So both of those. Now for me, that also dipped into, like, some local community colleges, and and from time to time, small colleges, not necessarily the big, big universities. Even though that's still technically education.
Right? You can't see my air quotes, but I'm doing air quotes. Yes. I don't know, Phil.
What what is your experience there? What would you say typifies then, you know, the SLED experience?
Yeah. I mean, right right along the lines what you said, you know, it's we small small universe small universities, large universities, community colleges, k through twelve. Typically, when I think of SLED, I think of a k through twelve because those when I think of SLED, I often think of great, and then we'll talk about it a little bit later. And that's I know.
Well, we could skip that part if you'd like. Yeah. It's it's a bear. I I I think the world should know what we have to deal with.
But yeah. No. I I I agree. Yeah. Community college, university, k through twelve. And we don't we personal I mean, we do some, local government, like, some cities here and there, like, some outdoor wireless.
And, from the networking standpoint, we don't do a ton. I can't say we don't have any, city of Shaker Heights. I think we take care of that entire city. But it's usually server work on the bank. Okay.
Well, let let's focus on the education piece, whether it be k twelve, getting into some local community college. I say local, but you know what I mean. Community colleges and those kind of organizations.
What would you guys say? Maybe, Jason, we'll start with you just to kinda go back and forth here. What is unique about Sled?
Maybe that's even different about enterprise networks. What we would consider, like, typical enterprise networks. And by the way, before before you answer, Phil, you were talking about, like, you know, what a large enterprise is. I don't know if you guys went down the whole Cisco certification path, but I remember doing that and then, like, reading in a Cisco textbook, like, us and Cisco would say, like, an SMB or in other words, a small and medium sized business with perhaps fifteen thousand employees, and then they would go on. And I'm just like, on what planet?
On what and that's like Cisco's perspective. Right? You know, like, a small a small enterprise is like thousands and thousands of people. And, and for us, that was like a whale customer. Right? But, anyway, Jason, please don't let me, don't only stop you. What what do you think?
Some of the things that that and I've been learning as I go here. Well, like I said, I've only been here since April. But, I mean, what really struck me was how much that schools are expected to do with with the little resources that they have. You know what I mean? So, like, they don't have enough staff. They don't have enough money.
They have to leverage things like E Rate, which you we we can talk more about, but there that's obviously a way that that schools get funded, by the government to to do things like like purchasing more equipment or services from someone like us to help them out because they need help.
And, you know, just a lot of those constraints, those constraints with, you know, added on expectations. So every time you turn around, there's, like, more regulation and there's more, that's being expected out of these folks. So, you know, it's really important. I I feel like our role's really enabling them, helping them, make it through and and, accomplish all of their goals because there's just so much to do with so little.
So that's one thing. It stands out in particular in k through twelve. I think it's a little easier to move move up through, you know, universities and colleges. They they have a little bit more budget, but, you know, they're they're dealing with with very large infrastructures.
And, and, you know, there's a lot of expectations around, you know, performance and the whole student experience. And you hear that a lot, you know, in k through twelve or in universities, like, you know, the the student experience is an important part and actually is is, you know, a big reason like, a big selling point for a lot of, like, the the colleges and universities, to attract students. So, you know, having good infrastructure and and and knowing what you're doing there, you know, it's really important.
So, yeah, I mean, it's I guess it's it's all those things. And then, you know, I would say also things like content filtering in k through twelve, it's really important to to you know, from a security standpoint. So, you know, access aside, connectivity aside, you have to really make sure that those environments are locked down. So there's a big focus on what, folks can and can't get to and also segmentation by, you know, faculty and students, and they're just they're complex environments. And and I think that a lot a lot of people do, and we talked about this before we started.
They kinda might look down on on schools and say, oh, these are these are, you know, simple environments. But, I mean, in our experience, and and correct me if I'm wrong, Phil, but they're really not. There's there's a lot of complexity, and there's a lot of things to consider.
Well, I mean, I would agree with you in the sense that there is a lot of things to consider, but, no, not I didn't find that they were all complex. I mean, I dealt with a lot of schools where it was a relatively small school district, and so everything was a flat network because the staff that ran stuff, that that was their skill level. And and so when I went in, as a bar engineer, knowing how to you know, I could tell you all the LSA types for OSPF, but I didn't go there because they'd have to manage that day too. So I did keep things as simple as, as as was appropriate for the staff that was there full time.
But the complexity came in and and by the way, that's not always the case. There were some very large schools. There was a lot of complexity. But I I found that the layers of complexity came in with all of these requirements, like you said, access control, the importance of Wi Fi and then, you know, the network access control that was involved with that.
And then all of the various devices dealing with the headaches of the various devices and then, like, the smart screen thingies in the in the the classrooms and, you know, multicast DNS that you had to deal with all the Apple TVs and all that.
And and there there was a lot of stuff in in that in that regard. And then, you know, you think, oh, it's just simple Wi Fi. And, you know, a lot of people would default to, like, one one access point per classroom, which I know a lot of Wi Fi folks who like that that rubs them the wrong way because they're like, well, you need to do an active survey and, you know, AP on a stick and go around and blah blah blah. And you're like, you know what? Stick an AP in every classroom right in the middle and four in the gym.
Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm a Wi Fi guy, and I go by that standard. I mean, by the time you get done with that survey and a stick, that's the design you're coming up with anyway. What's the other thing?
Charge custom all the way up.
A huge amount of money you're charged for doing an active survey.
I would do passive surveys back in the day where I would go around and kinda take some basic measurements. I mean, that's something that you can do in a day in a building or even less than a day, a couple hours depending on the size of the building. And then, yeah, it ended up being you know? Now keep in mind that, and we haven't talked about E rate yet, but sometimes, like, we had to spend the money.
And so it's just like, let's just buy eight hundred APs and the appropriate switches because we have to spend the money. Lots of capacity in the gyms and auditorium.
Exactly. Yeah. So, Phil, what what about your perspective? You know, what do you consider kinda unique or different about SLED compared to, like, enterprise or even even if you wanna get into, like, service provider and and other kinda organizations like that, other kinda networks?
Yeah. You know, I'm right in line with you with what you guys said. You know, specifically, Jason, talk about k through twelve. A lot of times, it is like one guy wearing all hats.
Sometimes it's just the IT director, and his needle of where his skill set, you know, resides in everything he's gotta support in the school district, could be anywhere. He could be an expert at the network with weekend servers or, you know, really good servers, but not so so well with voice. You know? So, a lot of times when we come in, it's it's it's a crapshoot if, they even know how their network topology looks.
So they have network diagrams. You know? How is it architected?
Usually, there's a lot of pain points that, you know, that that we come into or, like, you know, we have this issue all the time and, you know, just trying to get to the root of it when, you know, we're coming in. Again, you know, it's usually E rate driven. Not always E rate driven. We're coming in because there was a hardware sale, but the hardware sale off is always overturning.
Well, we need all this rearchitected as well. So, so helping them through that. I I I love to do that because we get to, you know, take a deep dive in the network, educate the customer on what they have if they don't already know, and make it better. Right?
And, and they do sometimes have, you know, complex technologies where they do have to support the MDNS, like you said, the Bonjour services, and they have multiple network segments, and we need to bridge those network segments. You know, that's not a that's not an easy thing to grasp if you haven't, you know, played with some of those protocols to help you with that.
And then we parlay that over to university. They have a lot of the same needs. You know? Res halls in particular, you know, the kids wanna get their Alexa on the network.
They want their Apple TVs. They want to have privacy with the devices that they have in their dorm room where nobody else can see them, but they can control all those devices. And there are ways to do that, but that steps up the notch a little bit in complexity and how we have to implement NAC solutions to help out with that or, you know, personal wireless networks, things like that. So but within universities, we often have, more staff, you know, more people dedicated to Philip positions, sometimes, you know, dedicated network engineer or multiple.
And now we're dealing with, you know, verticals within the organization where, you know, you can't get the server guy when you need them to do VM installs or you can't get to the the security guy because you gotta open up firewall rules. Now you're playing some red tape game and and and things like that, which I think parallels, enterprise very well.
You know, because large enterprises typically have dedicated engineers for those roles.
But, again, the red tape game, maybe they don't need the multicast, you know, or DNS services and all MDNS services and all that, but they'll have different requirements. You know, maybe they're looking for fabric and overlay networks, you know, things that, you know, drive up the complexity from that standpoint. So so, yeah, I I'd say any level of all of those could be complex or simple, just depending on the needs. But I I find universities with res halls always have a level of complexity that's required there from a networking standpoint.
Yeah. The whole dorm thing is another beast altogether. I've done that as well where and it's a separate network, but it's kinda not the the separate network and then, oh, it's a different budget. That was another thing was dealing with the money, you know, dealing with the money.
I never dealt with the money. I agree with the comp because I you know, as an engineer, I'm just you know, I'm there. But you hear all these conversations and you're part and parcel of that whole that whole, sales cycle in the process, especially as a presales engineer and, you know, dealing with your E rate. And then also, you know, what I found was that the professional services, I mean, they were absolutely critical because they you know, these these especially k through twelve leaned on us as a bar.
And it you know how, like, the all the bars out there will say, like, we're your partner in, you know, whatever and helping you succeed. And it's it's marketing. Right? It's just marketing slop.
It's not the case when you're dealing with school districts that you've worked with for year after year after year, and you're their trusted partner. It really is a thing.
That's something that I think is is different and unique. It was very fulfilling for me, but also unique when compared to enterprise, which I did not experience that in enterprise. We were the VAR. We came in.
We were quiet. We did our work interface where we need to interface. Like, people interface is what I'm talking about. Yeah.
And then, and then left hopefully with a a very successful closeout meeting.
Can can one of you Phil, maybe I'll I'll go I'll give this one to you. But what is what is E rate? We've mentioned it several times. Can you define it for us?
I don't know if I can put an exact definition to it, like the e in E rate. Not too sure what that stands for, but it's basically a government program that, allows schools to get funding for technology. There's different levels of E rate.
I, you know, I don't know what the different variances of the different levels, but I know there's funds provided for networking per, per se. I think some of the original E rate, funding was for broadband and things like that. But the E rate as I know it today is, giving funding for for network budget, and it's very specific to, you know, how much they're gonna provide. And they look at actually the, the discount lunch program, that the school district, at least in the state of Ohio.
So the state of Ohio, if we have a school district that has, like, ninety percent of the students are in discount discounted lunches, they get a ninety percent, reduction in the cost for their IT gear. So Interesting. Government funds that ninety percent of gear. So we have some school districts that almost get all their equipment for free.
It's it's very close because we got a couple poor areas, you know, in and around Cleveland. So I think it I think it's amazing that we can deliver, you know, good technology to students that more than ever need it. You know, they're coming in from impoverished areas, and then the ones that, you know, are more wealthy, they have the funding to do it already anyway. So so that's how I see E rate from a a networking standpoint specifically.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean and, honestly, that seemed to drive a lot of the projects that I did, was E rate funding. Like, we would put the proposal together in anticipation of them getting the grant. And then we had to spend, all of the grant.
So, you know, I don't I don't think that especially the bars that I worked for, we didn't and and me as a presales engineer when I did that, like, we didn't strive to, like, use up all the budget because it was there. We we tried to do the best that we could and and the right thing for the customer. But that was a a component. And then the kickoff meeting, which always happened about two weeks before graduation because you don't take networks down during the middle of finals or during the middle of, well, you don't do that in enterprise anyway. You don't take networks down in the middle of the day, but you certainly, avoid those kind of projects even overnight during the school year.
But one thing I did so we worked all summer. Right? One thing that I did really appreciate I don't know if this is your experience, guys.
I would go into a customer, small district or even a very large school district, and I'd be like, okay. When can we start our work? We're gonna be taking this building offline, or we're gonna we're gonna swap switches in this closet. Right?
We're gonna do this IDF or these three IDFs tonight. What what time can we start? And they're like, well, the the school day ends at three thirty. That's what time the buses get here.
So three thirty two, you're you're good to go. And I'm like, really? So I don't have to start my cutover at midnight and midnight to five AM? So I I did appreciate that a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah. Totally agree. Yeah. Like I said, I'm I'm wrapping up a, a deployment right now with the school district.
Yeah. My my day was eight to five. I'm able to be on this call at six o'clock because Yep. You know, you gotta work around staff maybe.
You know, for universities, there's sometimes, you know, summer camps and things like that. But, just working on admin staff is really the toughest thing, and they get it. They they know things that have to go down.
Yeah. Yeah.
Make things better.
And I and I and I had the experience of of working, like, those midnight cutovers even in SLED, even in k through twelve because there are certain projects that that's what it requires and or it just takes that long if you're doing a big data center, core, you know, rip and replace or something like that.
Which for me, by the way, just to give you a little bit of an idea of my age, I, you know, when I first started, I was installing, like, Catalyst sixty five o nines and sixty five thirteens and then swapping soups over the course of the years and swapping the line cards and blah blah blah. And then around the time when I left the the VAR space, and got into, like, presales, I was swapping out those sixty those same customers. I was taking out those sixty five hundreds and putting in, like, ninety six hundreds and ninety five hundred, whatever, you know, whatever specific, form factor we needed. So I saw, like, full cycle with some of my customers, which was really neat. And I think that's I think that's a unique thing to the to the sled world as well. Right?
Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. I've been with Lake Tech, almost ten years now, and I'm starting to well, I have been for the past few years replacing networks that I put in when I started Lake Tech, which is, yeah, it's it's it's interesting to see your baby being taken your original baby being taken out and, you know, upgrading it with a a new baby.
It's Some of those babies are painful.
I remember doing a a university, project. It was a state university here in New York, so it was part of the SUNY system. But, in any case, I'm doing a project. We're putting in Nexus seven k's.
And if you remember, you know, side by side, so there's a a pair of them. And if you remember where you patch your fiber, the the lid that covers the fiber, the plastic lid, it it goes up. Like, it it goes up like a car hood, or a bonnet if you're in the UK. And, I remember being in there, plugging stuff, doing my thing, and then, like, getting up quickly and smacking my head on on the plastic, which is heavy plastic.
It's not like, you know, you know, it's not it's not cheap. Better not be for what they're charging for those things or or they used to.
And, again, this is an audio only podcast, so you can't see my my my my head. But I do have a scar right in the middle of my head, and I shave my head. So you can see it from that day. I was bleeding down, like, my cheek and everything.
So, a lot of war stories from from Sled as well because, frankly, you're it. You're the guy. I would go in and and, you know, I would have to figure out how to, like, figure out group policy because we're putting in a Cisco ICE thing. Yes.
I used to do ICE. And we'd have to figure out, all the wireless stuff, and then, like, I'd be doing POE budgets and figuring out power. Like, literally, in my I'm not an electrician, so you ended up being the guy and and getting hit on the head in the process.
Literally have the scars to prove it.
You know, I you mentioned something interesting, though, and that's that's something that's been coming up for us too is power.
A a lot of the the schools we've been working with lately, we've been helping them with their UPS systems and PDUs. And it's be and it's just because, you know, they don't have the expertise in house, and and we can easily assist. Yeah. And then things like monitoring that after the fact because I think we've all probably encountered that.
Somebody just puts in a UPS and thinks it's good and forgets about it. Then, you know, five years later, power goes out, batteries are dead, and everything goes down. Shot. So you have to, you know, maintain those things for for clients.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about E rate, and I wanted to kind of, like, bring that back around and mention, you know, there's lots of different different, like, categories for E rate, and and we're learning a lot about this.
Like, there's category one. Yeah. And category two. So category one's, like, for, like, Internet access where, you know, that that gets funded.
And then you'll have, like, what's called MIBs, which is, like, it's managed internal broadband services that actually covers things like wife managed Wi Fi, managed wired services, things like that. And then, basic maintenance and internal connections, which which correct me if I'm wrong, Phil. It's more like, for if you're doing one big capital expend expense to put in equipment and and the project to run it, And then the MIBs is more like managed services. So there's there's lots of rules around these things too.
Like, there's there's only, like you know, I heard this recently. There's there's certain things you can plug into, those devices based on the the type of funding you got. So there's a lot of, like, strict rules around each of these categories and different types. So it's a complex program to navigate it.
I've learned a lot from the Lake Tech team because they've done so much of it, and I didn't realize how many layers they I've heard of a E Rate before. I've heard of, you know, having a spin number and all this stuff, but it there's Yeah.
Absolutely. Luckily, we have some of our account executives, are experts in it. So, you know, when I put together a bomb, you know, they're kinda guiding me along. Like, well, you know, we can't do x y z.
Like, we can't do redundancy in some of the, in some of the in some of the areas. Like, NAC's not supported. NAC is not e readable. You know?
So, you know, yeah, it's not. So they have to buy that out of pocket unless I think there's new, new rules now that if you can roll it into a managed services agreement, now maybe you can provide NAC. But there's some E rate funding that provides managed services from from what I understand.
But, again, above my pay grade. Once the once the network's deployed, I hand it over to the manager services team if it's going that way, and I, you know, wipe my hands over. I forget we're not on video here. It's all real.
And so until when you refresh it three to five years later, then then you can look at it.
You know, I don't know if you guys, Philip, since you've done some of the deployment, some of the complexities of, you know, just being hand tied when you're reviewing the, the RFPs.
You know? Because for our customers that we support today, you know, we help them write the RFP and we make it very clear and you know, so that we can answer very clearly. Sometimes RFPs, they don't know what they're asking for.
So, you know, we may win an RFP and then, you know, we find out that the the the SFPs that they needed don't match the the fiber plant that they have, you know, within the organization. You know, we're doing live, you know, you know, I forget what they call it when you have to do an addendum to the E rate purchase, but get the right optics, you know, get the right. It's, you know, just getting into the environment, ahead of time, you just you can't do it on on, you know, bidding on some of the projects, which makes it difficult.
Difficult, but that's the fun part. Do you remember times you probably still experience it? I don't anymore, but I remember times where I'm at a project. It's the wrong optics.
Always on optics. Sending emails and calling the project manager, and I'm like, do we have anything in the back closet back at the office? I need, you know, this, you know, it's an l c to l c connector. What whatever it is, you know.
I'm like, that was a lot of fun because, you know, we did end up so here here's something.
And this is leading into what I was you know, what we're talking about. You know, I worked on k k through twelve projects where the school district was, you know, one school was five hundred students, a few dozen staff, whatever. Very, very small and, you know, the opposite of complex. Completely flat, closet switches, a lot of unmanaged what whatever.
Whatever. But then I went and and I and and being in New York, I worked from, you know, New York City all the way to the Canadian border, Buffalo all the way to the Massachusetts border, the entire state. And there are, very, very tiny rural districts. And then there are suburbs outside of, like, Albany, Buffalo, down in New York City area where there may be seven thousand students, eleven thousand students in the school district, hundreds of school buses, several thousand staff, campuses.
So you have the campus of, like, the several high school buildings. Across town is the campus of several middle schools. We call them junior high in my day. So, you know, the complexity of those was was huge.
And so when we got an E rate or they got approved for an E rate project, it could be like a seven point five million dollar project.
And so all of a sudden, on the loading dock at the high school or at the maintenance building, there'd be pallets and pallets of switches, or wireless controllers, or both, or access points, and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I I would go on-site, and I would spend the first two days with a scanner and auto populating spreadsheets and making sure everything was okay. Sometimes we'd be able to send a junior engineer.
But again, it's Delegate, buddy.
It's You you delegate. But if it's a low margin project, you're the engineer and that's the or or this is on me. I don't trust anybody. I should delegate. I get I get it. But I've been there in the middle of the night where I'm like, these are the wrong power cables. You know, the c thirteens versus the c fourteens, and I can't plug this thing in, and it's two AM.
So I I admit I should learn to delegate, but there's a part of me that's like, I I don't trust anybody.
I'm gonna do this myself. So there's there is that and I I think it's important for folks to realize that we say k through twelve, but we could be talking and and, like, oh, it's just a small school district, whatever. We could be talking about a literal ten thousand person organization with various roles and emergency services and mobile device, like school buses with, LTE cards and routers in them. I've done all that.
So the complexity, the mission critical nature of some of those things tied back into the to, you know, there's police officers stationed at the individual school sometimes, and so they have, like, their, you know, whatever I don't know. Whatever whatever whatever kind of network connection they have. So there's a there could be quite a bit of complexity and and quite a bit of stuff to to handle and get your your mind wrapped around, which I I found really fun and, and interesting because it required me to be broad. Not necessarily always deep, I admit, but very broad, which I really liked a lot.
Kept my my job very interesting. I was not, like, just routers. Mhmm.
You know?
Yeah. You definitely learn how to troubleshoot clients.
The the myriad of clients that don't work correctly and whatever the case may be, it's complicated inside of the, you know, drivers, you know, the m m cast DNS, you know, the multicast DNS isn't the right portal, you know, all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, I mean, you're talking all all the pain points. And, yeah, you know, we we've tried really hard at Lake Tech to try to streamline a lot of that to, you know, automate actually, the one of the the things that Jason's working on right now is to help us with some automation of, looking at the configurations of the existing switches and mapping it out to the new switches that are being put in so we don't have to go through and dig through every single port configuration for all the one off ports and and define those.
You know, let's use automation. Let's use some scripting. Let's use some AI to make that happen. I'm sure Jason would be more than happy to talk through that.
But, you know, like, this week, I actually didn't go on-site because we pre provision all of the switches ahead of time. And I have contractors on-site, you know, doing the physical labor. I you know, the one off ports are marked. The uplinks have to be as they are.
I'm monitoring remotely. I see that the switches come up. So we're always trying to make that a little bit easier. You know, as time goes on, you know, of course, I'll fall on-site if I need to.
But, you know, all those lessons learned, all those pain points, all those heartaches that that you just mentioned, we try to find ways to, you know, work around that and make it easier on us. And so far so good. It could be a lot better, but all the pain points still exist.
I mean, I I remember in twenty thirteen, twenty fifteen, and I'm, you know, doing a switch refresh. Right? And, you know, automation existed, you know. It it wasn't like a it wasn't invented in twenty sixteen, but that's kinda when it did catch on, though.
Yeah. And so one of the things that I've struggled with, and I really mean this, it's been kind of a struggle in the sense of, you know, I'm not sure how things fit. You know, I I'm a very big proponent of network automation, and right now I'm very focused on the AI space. But I always struggle with, like, how do I apply some of this stuff working for a VAR?
Because I can't automate the day two operations. I can help them with an automation project. Right? So, like, I can help my customer in in the context of automation.
But if I'm doing a deployment, you know, automating certain things was just it was just very difficult, and it it didn't make sense a lot of the time. If I had three hundred switches and I can, you know, cable them all up and and push config and do all the okay. And I could do that, like, back at the warehouse or in their in their warehouse. But I did struggle with that a little bit.
I I never got really solid, comfortable use cases for automation working for a VAR. Do do you guys see it differently and experience it differently? It sounds like you do.
Yeah. We do. So, you know, I came from another bar where we we leveraged a lot of automation, to stand up new environments.
And, really, the need came out of COVID lead times from the all the supply chain issues. Like, so we're sitting here waiting up upwards of a year waiting for gear to land, and the and, you know, customers wondering, what can we do in the meantime to get ready for this so when the gear lands, we can get that stuff in and get it working? So, you know, we we developed a practice around, you know, preconfiguring all of it, having all our playbooks ready so that when those switches landed, we could, you know, enable an API in the switch switches and blow those configs in and and rapidly deploy.
And that's what we are adopting here. We we've we've been talking about it a little bit, but prime time for us is now. You know? Summertime, when all the kids are out of school, like, we're going into the busy season.
This is when when we gotta get a lot of stuff done to help these schools get their upgrades knocked out. So for us juggling so many of those projects, you know, this year, we're we're are gonna have a few things done. Like like Phil mentioned, we're we're we are developing our own internal capability to pull in the configs from the existing switches. So be it Cisco or older Aruba switches, pull in those configs, normalize them, and put them into we we do a lot with Aruba.
So will we be deploying Aruba CX switches, but basically mapping those configurations. Long term, we plan to to to take those configurations, put them into a network model, and then then leverage, you know, like a network source of truth, like like a NetBox or, or, ops mills, infra hub, or something along those lines to to normalize that data and then build the configs off that. And then we could use zero touch provisioning to, stand those devices up, put a, you know, the the version of code they're supposed to run on them, and then deploy those configurations and and, you know, find ways to match them up in key and say, here's here's your config switch.
We've already prebuilt it. So by the time the hardware lands, we can rapidly deploy those environments. We also leverage you know, they have cloud, cloud managed platforms like Aruba's got got central, so we'll be able to push configs via that too.
I think it's just one of those things that that you just have to do. Now day two, you do you you do have an interesting point. Like, day two, like, what do you do? And I think that depends on whether or not the customer wants to adopt automation and they have the right culture to do so because not everybody does. Right? So you you you definitely have some people who are more comfortable with that approach than others. But in cases where we're managing it, it's just gonna make our job easier, you know, our lives easier at Lake Tech for, for us to make configuration changes in an automated way because it's consistent configuration.
The other changes we make are uniform and tested.
And it it just you know, we'll just make that environment that that much more cohesive and, and secure if we're leveraging automation.
So, I mean, that's gonna be a big big push for us. As Phil mentioned, like, we're we're working on that stuff now, and that's really one of my, major charges over the course of the next year is to get all that deployed for us.
Yeah. Deployed for your MSP? Well, I mean, deploy your you did talk about your own deployment. So you're doing whatever, switch refresh for your customers, and you're able to pull config, push them, all that stuff.
But you're also an MSP in the sense that you do manage moves, ads, changes, day two, troubleshoot. Right? Okay. Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So the intention would be for deployment and then ongoing operations, having an automation framework that, that can appropriately manage all of that, in in a uniform and and concise way.
Yeah. I'm definitely looking forward to it, you know, because I I've grown up, you know, doing, like, basic automation scripting, like, you know, like, any of just CLI, like, macros, just just run across something to make my job easier. Just very basic, basic stuff, but I've never really taken that bull by the horns and really understood automation, you know, through an Ansible or really leverage APIs to their full capability. So I'm looking really forward to, you know, seeing what that world looks like and how it can benefit Lake Tek and our really our customers in the end.
Yeah. Ultimately. I mean and you too. Right? Because if you're, making your own deployments more efficient, sure, it's good for the customer, but you also reduce the number of hours, hopefully increasing margin on that particular project and making your life easier, reducing the number of your own internal kinda, you know, tickets or whatever you call them. So, you know, we've we've talked about, wireless and and NAC quite a bit, and and rightly so because I think that's a it's a big deal in k through twelve. So what what technologies, what kind of projects would you say are, that kind of stand out as more prominent, that happen more frequently, in in in what you do with k through twelve?
So it's a lot of, you know, I I think as we've said, it's a lot of, you know, core ag access, you know, switch replacement. That's that's the most prominent thing that that we're doing at least from an E rate perspective and then EP replacements, you know, when when that life cycle hits and they got the budget to go Wi Fi seven or wherever they're gonna go.
You know, the those are the the big things that we're doing for the k through twelve, at least from a networking standpoint, is just just the entire infrastructure, you know, rip and replace. Sometimes it's not the entire infrastructure, so you gotta make old work with new. So, you know, you wanna mix in, you know, Wi Fi four APs, Wi Fi seven APs. So you gotta make sure you're consolidating all those in the right areas.
I'd say some of the more fun ones that I get to work on is when we start doing some of the more advanced technologies like we are doing, like, centralized overlays. You know? So when we have switches that have the capabilities of overlaying traffic across the, you know, a layer three underlay and terminating, that layer two in a centralized area, like on a controller in a data center. Those are fun because then you can really cookie cutter the switches.
All the switch ports are identical, and NAC is taking care of the wired authentication, positioning that client on the controller in the in the data center, and then, you know, egressing on whatever VLAN, whatever ACLs that need to be done. I think those are a lot of fun. We don't do as many of those as I would like. I'd like to evangelize that more, you know, especially with the VXLAN technology that's really, you know, coming to fruition, you know, for, universities.
No. I know it's been around for a while, but I think some of the, the enhancements and the, that you get out of having those overlay technologies are huge.
And I think they're for for k through twelve, they make a lot more sense for, the the wireless network as well because you are talking about an entirely completely mobile, not a workforce, but, you know, student body, but, people that are connecting that way.
As opposed to, like, an an office. Think about an office building where you have cubicles and and folks sit at their desk. And there is some mobility, of course, because they have their phones or tablet or laptop and they move around to a conference room. But I don't consider that full, like, roaming or full mobility.
That's just like you're mostly in one spot and then maybe you go to another spot for a little bit and then you go back. Whereas that's not the case in k through twelve. So for me, it was entire like, the yeah. Yeah.
We did you know, if they got a five million dollar e rate project, they'd be like, we're we're gonna replace everything. So, yes, we did touch everything. It's like firewalls and switches and, you know, let's throw some wireless printers in there. But, by and large, the the most the most common project for me was, was was wireless because they were always upgrading, augmenting, adding to wireless because it just became more important every year.
And there might be some additional switches because you had you know, you need the switches or you need to upgrade your PoE switch because you need more power per port, blah blah blah. So there was that. But, you know, I did not We didn't replace cores every three years or three that that was not how that worked. I mean, those things were run until, like, we needed to because of whatever design changes and, you know, upgrades.
And I also did very, very little, like, advanced routing. Very little advanced routing because, well, it just wasn't necessary. So I dealt with a lot of flat networks. Or if there was routing, it was very simple. We did not route to the closet like a lot of people like I wanted to do. That did not happen because I couldn't hand that off day two to anybody.
When I was leaving, you know, this discussion of overlay that it was relegated to the network I'm sorry, to the wire wireless network only. We weren't doing, like, dot one expert port for, you know, physical ports for people on wired connections.
So for me, it was predominantly that. But but one thing that you mentioned that we didn't bring up again was the voice component.
I know a lot of people think that that's like a dead technology, but that is that was like a primary revenue source for the bars I worked for in k through twelve.
You know, phones in every classroom, of course, and then, the the, I mean, I did primarily Cisco call manager at the time. I don't know what they call it now, but, that was that was big business for us.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. You know, I I we see a lot of, Jason, I don't know what what your opinion is on what coming to Lake Tech.
We've got a lot of, you know, teams, types of deployments going on where a lot of our customers are taking that handset off the desk and migrating the teams and getting into that whole world of collaboration there. But, yeah, you know, the real real handsets on desk are still a thing. You still gotta work out the LDP and other, you know, recognizing the voice VLAN and all that. So that's always, you know, something you gotta dive into as you come up with that new switch configuration to make sure that, the the phones are being positioned correctly.
But, yeah, we see it here. We're doing a lot of Teams, systems migrations.
Yeah. And and I the one thing I didn't think about until I I came over and and learned more about it is that you've gotta have that phone in a classroom for someone to pick it up and call nine one one. Like, that's still, you know, a very real thing that that that, folks need to have. So, you know, there are still a lot of schools that have phone systems, and they could be IP based.
You know, I'm I'm guessing a lot of the vast majority are moving to cloud based phone systems at this point, but there is still some on prem. You know, there's still folks that they just just feel better about having phone lines come into that phone system. They know how it works. They, you know, it it it really just their culture, they kinda dictates, hey.
If it's not broke, don't fix it. Leave it the way it is.
Maybe they'll do incremental upgrades and, you know, upgrade to the the latest, greatest phone system, but they still really like the comfort of having that that phone system in house because of it it is that lifeline to the outside world if they need somebody, you know, if they need to call call, you know, the the police or or an ambulance or Well, in some jurisdictions or school districts, I guess, a jurisdiction, municipal whatever.
In some areas, the schools are required to have, hardwired phones in the classroom. Cell phones do not count, and, and they you you know how you can put, like, a passcode to use a phone, like, on the teacher's desk? No passcode on the on, like, the wall phone. And so I remember doing that and having to mess around with it. So, like, this phone can call four numbers, you know, and the numbers are nine one one, the front office, and whatever else. And then, like, the principal or superintendent will get, like, that twelve hundred dollars super amazing, like, executive phone, and everybody else had the, like, cheap whatevers.
But but the phone the phone systems were a big thing as well. So for me, it was wireless voice, and at the time, it was on prem voice for sure. Those were two, very, very big, you know, consistent, common projects for the bars I worked for. And then, you know, the associated projects kinda, like, went along with it, like, which was we had to do the switch refresh because we may we need more POE or something like that.
And yeah. No. I I don't think once for for any of those customers that I configure, like, BGP communities and stuff.
Yeah. Same.
Or or just basics basic routing. You know? Very, very, very good.
We've got a few, you know, our universities are typically running OSPF, but I can't think of any of our key twelves that do anything more than static routing.
Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, that that is a that is a interesting point, though. Do you consider universities, like, larger universities, part of, like, the SLED world considering that, yeah, they tend to be much larger in scope and there is even more complexity?
Would you just say, yeah, that's just a type of enterprise, or is it kind of its own I don't know. What do you think?
Yeah. I mean, great question. I mean, in my mind, I consider them enterprise. They never fall into the SLED category in my head, but I think, technically, they are SLED.
Yeah. I definitely think a university is enterprise. You know, again, with the nuances like we discussed earlier, the dormitories, the, you know, the the pervasive roaming, you know, in and out of buildings, between campus buildings, things like that. But, yeah, I I consider them enterprise.
In some ways, they're similar. I mean, I think the the, you know, funding, some of the E rate stuff we talked about obviously differs. But, the ways that they are similar is that you've got, you know, IoT devices to manage for, you know, for for classroom support. You've got use users that are students and probably well, I don't know.
Maybe more lax access policies for for students because I, you know, I I do do notice in in a lot of higher ed environments, there's like this do not, you know, inhibit or or, you know, overly filter things. Like, they they try not to because they don't wanna, you know, inhibit learning. So I think that there is, like, you know, that this this, process that it's thought process around just leaving things open and letting them get to whatever they need to. But connectivity is is still important to a lot of the a lot of the actual, ways you connect, you leveraging NAC to, you know, to make sure that they're authorized to connect to the network.
You know, a lot of those things are similar, but so they do overlap, but you're right. It it is treated more like an enterprise network probably than than than than a k twelve.
I mean, I I would say so because, I mean, you think about, like, a large state university, like, the one, you know, maybe ten miles from me. It's got twenty thousand undergrads and, like, five thousand graduates or whatever it is. I don't know how many staff, but, you know, do the math. And it's a huge campus plus all of the, like, little campuses.
What's the plural of camp camp I? All the campuses all around upstate New York that are related to the university at Albany. And then, and then all the, the the partnerships that require all sorts of interesting connections and then, of course, all the research that's going on. So you have, like, doctor so and so's lab that has to be air gapped, but he still wants support.
But he needs a connection to this server, but, like, wait a minute. It has to be this distro, like, Linux whatever because it was you know, that's what works with this code. And so the the the I mean, I mean, I'm being silly, but some of the complexity in these larger universities with several data centers on campus and with, you know, cloud resources that they're utilizing and with and, of course, SaaS and all these kind of things.
And then, you know, perhaps endowments in the billions with a b so that they the IT staff could be a hundred people with a hundred million dollar budget. So I consider them large enterprise. Now I am talking about a, like, big university, not like Bob's University around the corner with, you know, nine people, but, that I I would put them in that category.
Yeah. For sure. And then, like Jason, mentioned, you know, the funding is different too. You know, universities get different types of funding or no funding.
They get, you know, they get grants of or it can source grants, of course, but, yeah, it's not E rate. So and, again, that's that's above my pay grade. I don't you know, I don't know how it all breaks down, but I I know they're they're not E rate eligible. And they have to find other ways to come up with the, how to how to how to upgrade that network.
And I do see universities go, and what you said earlier, usually it'd be, you know, the upgrade in the wireless one year and then switching the next year, or, you know, years apart. The coordinate works stay longer, I find, in universities and enterprise where k twelve, they might hold on to everything, you know, through its full life cycle and then life cycle the whole thing.
Or, I guess, I take that back. I mean, we we have lots of E Rate customers that that do the full gamma and and some that also do just switching one year and wireless the next, but, sometimes it's a full go. Usually, universities, I don't see a full go. They're almost always separate. We're gonna do wired, and then we're gonna do wireless. And then we're gonna do data center, and then we'll do core.
Which which makes sense. I mean, you wanna work in those network blocks and, you know, you take on one giant project and you try to do it over the summer. I mean, have fun. That's because it's inevitable that one of those pieces is not gonna go right.
And and you're gonna have the two AM Dunkin' Donuts. We have Dunkin' Donuts in northeast. I don't know if you do that guys do Dunkin' in Ohio. Okay.
You do. Good. Yeah.
It's just you can't say donuts anymore.
I know. I'm sorry. It's like a religion over here, though, in the northeast. Like, people, like, you will look at you funny if you're going to Starbucks instead of Dunkin'.
But that's not that's not really true. But, but, yeah, I mean, one of those projects has a hang up, and it has the cascade effect in your in your waterfall, because they can't really be agile if you're upgrading yours. You have to upgrade the switches before you upgrade your phones because you need a certain number of POE because you're going to video. I mean, that was what we did ten years ago.
I don't know if that's what's going on now, but I, I remember doing a project, in a suburb of New York City very, about five or six years ago, so not that long ago. And, you know, the the project was primarily, wireless driven, but we had to upgrade switches, which means we had to upgrade, and because we were gonna do, upgrade a lot of the backhaul and stuff, we had to also upgrade the fiber plant, which means we also had to upgrade UPSs because the switches had a bigger power, budget because the APs were, you know, the they required, I think, thirty watts. I mean, they didn't actually operate on thirty watts, but you know what I mean.
You have to, like, budget according to what the vendor spec says. And that also meant we had to, work with various unions because we weren't allowed to touch anything that was, like, plenum rated or this or that. So they had to get, you know, other people to go into the drop ceilings to run cable.
Appetuned.
Yeah.
And we had to talk to electricians to run more power and to increase service to a particular bill. I mean, it was nuts, and it and it was all in order.
But at the same time, it was also a lot of fun.
Yeah.
And and I think that that's the big thing for me. It's rewarding work. You know? It's I've been in network engineering for for twenty five years, but to know that the that the efforts we're putting in are going, you know, to educating people, you know, I I I love it. The it's it's really, really cool to be here and and to do the the type of work we're doing.
Yeah. I second that fully. Yeah. I've I've Yeah. I thoroughly enjoy, you know, helping out customers that, you know, that that need the help that, you know, in one educated, hey. This is this is how your network's functioning, or this is the advancements that we're gonna deliver, you know, today to make your life easier. Yeah.
So would you guys say that, you are completely and utterly swamped right now considering that is, I don't know when schools end in Ohio. In New York, they end the public schools end in about a week. So we're about to have the floodgates open for all of the small bars doing well and the big bars doing their their work this summer.
Yeah. No. They opened.
Guys are at?
Yep. They opened about a week and a half ago. Yeah. It's my my first deployment this year.
I've got, so we got teams of engineers. We've got so I think we're doing, I think, two schools right now. Seventeen is when we get, of course, several more throughout the summer. But, yep, it's fun.
I think we got twelve.
Okay. Sounds about right. Schools. Yeah. Yeah. Good to get done with. Yeah.
So we we are we're in the middle of it, boss.
Yeah. Which is fun. I do. I mean, I have a lot of fond memories of those days too. And then just driving over the across the entire state. I love I love driving. I love road trips and and just being in the middle of nowhere and, like, no oh, yeah.
It's probably one of my favorite parts about the job is seeing new new campuses, new enterprises, new manufacturing. Like, we do a lot of manufacture as well and just looking at some of the processes like, how is bubble wrap made?
Oh, cool.
That's how bubble wraps made. Okay.
Yeah. That's interesting. Yep. Well, gentlemen, this has been a real pleasure. I could go on and on because I feel like we've also just been reminiscing and talking about some memories and and our fondness for this kind of work.
So there is that, and that's okay. That's that's part of the show. That's part of who we are. And so I'm really glad that you were able to bring that.
And, and I enjoyed meeting it for the first time, Philip, and great to see you again, Jason. So for our audience, we are wrapping it up now. And if you have an idea for an episode of Telemetry Now, really would love to hear from you. You can reach out to us at telemetrynow@kentik.com.
And so for now, thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.