For Today's show Garrick Sturgill will be our guest. Garrick is senior Director at IsoFusion which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a colocation, cloud and networking company in the Pacific Northwest. He works in strategy and planning for network buildouts which include last mile fiber to the home which is a business that can use all the competition it can get in my opinion so I’m glad to see them moving into that market. Our conversation goes all over the place from the beginnings of the internet and Arpanet through Garrick’s work in the iconic Westin building in Seattle all the way up to the current bleeding edge of networking and low earth orbit satellites.
Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critial facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.
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Partial Transcript:
DF: welcome everybody to the good data podcast we have a great guest for you today Garrick Sturgill will be on the show Garrick is senior director at ISO fusion which if you haven't heard of it is a colocation cloud and networking company in the Pacific Northwest he works in strategy and planning for network build-outs which includes last-mile fiber-to-the-home which is a business that we can use a lot more competition and in my opinion so I'm glad to see them moving into that market our conversation goes all over the place from the beginnings of the internet and ARPANET through Garrick's work in the iconic Western building in Seattle all the way up to the current bleeding edge of networking and low Earth orbit satellites. Garrick packs a huge amount of knowledge into a very approachable package and I was so happy to have him on the show let's go.
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DF: Garrick thank you for coming on the program.
GS For sure
DF: So I really wanted to talk to you because here's someone who is steeped in every level of Internet history in that you know you've been involved in the Western building and and building up some of the backbone of infrastructure and then moving on to data center operations and things like that so I feel like you've touched every part of the stack and that's what I'm interested in so I really appreciate being able to talk to you
GS: just don't ask me any VMWare questions
DF: That's fine yeah. It's not really my forte either so I'd just like to start at your background so what was your first job in networking when you first started
GS: Oh my first job in networking well my first like official job was probably working for my parents my parents owned a were actually we're a part owner of a computer store up in Seattle called Ballard computers and they sold pcs not necessarily you know no Macs well I shouldn't say that no they they sold I believe they sold Mac but also we have like a pseudo ragtag enterprise division too where you go and you do you do installs my stepdad at the time actually ran the service department for the company so clients would come in and and then naturally they would need other stuff done in their offices and he would send me out on these like calls I mean I didn't go to school for for this but basically just being kind of tossed out into the world like hey go fix this
DF: it's usually the best way to learn really is you know it's like oh I don't really know what I'm doing but uh I'm gonna figure everything out and then it'll all kind of come into place
GS: I think yeah you know and in those offices at the time you know it wasn't mission-critical you know what I mean like like the network's inside of an office were like you know I mean it was like 10baseT I mean it was nothing people had email but it was still kind of like a novelty. people didn't really companies use it internally but people weren't sending each other like business emails right it least in my experience I mean I wasn't like super deep rooted into it at that point I was more of a inquisitive person funding the wanting to learn and know exactly you know what was going over for the wires you know I don't really care about software back then I'm more I was more into fiber optics and and cat5 at that point.
DF: So then you got somehow you you get connected to the Westin building and can you just first of all say what the Westin building is and just describe it quickly
GS: Yeah sure the Westin building is is the interconnection point up here in the northwest it's where all the carriers bring in terrestrial fiber into the meet new room and then there's a couple there's one Pacific cable that comes into the building and then there's a couple skinny routes which are like regional undersea fiber cable not really under seat but it runs in Puget Sound and there's a few data centers in there the current cup