Faron Hopper Email & Phone Number

Smithfield, Virginia, Us

I have guided the network and telecom teams through a migration away from an outsource IT provider with extremely small impact; moved to a new WAN provider (> 80 WAN sites) with about 4 hrs of downtime/site; stood up 3 new distribution centers ($50-$150 Million each); integrated 5 new sites into our WAN and decommissioned 4 sites; installed 50 pairs of IoT firewalls ($700k+ and providing protection to the company). During the IoT project I also caught a VAR mistake which netted us a savings of $150k while keeping the project in the black. I led the company away an IT outsource vendor that took months of planning and was implemented with minimal down time. I renegotiated our firewall support contract and saved about $35,000.00 over 3 years. During our last new distribution center buildout project, my team was an instrumental in designing and installing WI-FI in the parking lot saving the company the cost of a 4G direct antenna system saving an estimated $400k. When an internal business unit decided to expand and buy a new factory, I traveled to Las Vegas to assist with analysis of the site for the network, server, telephony, and WIFI infrastructure that needed to be purchased and then oversaw the installation of that equipment.For the employee management aspect of my current role, I approve time sheets/vacation requests, provide guidance to the team on issues and career paths, conduct interviews for new candidates/contractors, oversee the change process, and work on internal processes. When an issue comes up among team members, I approach the individuals and determine what steps are required for resolution or if we need to have interactions with HR. The team I work with is highly intelligent and they require delicate interactions to keep them performing at 100%, and as we work through issues, I have been instrumental in keeping them highly productive.

Smithfield, Virginia, Us

Daily responsibilities include managing over 80 WAN sites consisting of production plants, sales offices, corporate offices, and another 600 DSD sites that are connected to Smithfield via VPN tunnels. I lead the Network team in technical direction, rotated in/out of on-call, worked with vendors to purchase IT equipment, worked with VAR's to provide benefit to Smithfield on top of providing technical items to purchase. I developed the documentation process that the network team uses on a daily basis.

Olathe, Ks, Us

Managing mutiple data centers, over 20,000 LAN ports, approximately 65 WAN sites (each site has 2 ISR G2 routers running BGP or EIGRP for dynamic failover, about 1/2 use MPLS and DMVPN, and the other half uses 2 DMVPN routers for WAN connectivity). This is the list of devices and technology I currently work on: Cisco - Nexus 7010's, 5596's, 248's, 2232's - Catalyst 6509's, 4500-X's, 4510's, 3850's, 3750x's, 2960's - ASR 9001, 1002-X, 1002, ISR G2 4451-X (with UCS), 3900, 2900 series routers - ASA 5510, 5520, ASASM - 5500 Wireless LAN Controllers - ACS 5.xRiverbed - Steelhead 550, 755CX, 1050, 1555CX, 2050, 5050, 5055CX, 7055CX - Interceptor 9350 - CMCSolarwinds OrionPython for testing scriptsThis is the list of devices that the above Cisco hardware has replaced that I used to work on:Brocade - FastIron 800, 1500 - BigIron RX8's, RX16's - FCX 48GSCheckpoint firewalls. - Smart-1 - UTM 274's - Crossbeam x80 - R70.30 - R75.40Meru - 3000 Controllers - E(z)RF - Ekahau Surveying Software

Manage over 8000 LAN ports, manage approximately 50 WAN sites, and manage 60 firewalls. The devices are Cisco and Brocade switches, Cisco routers, and Cisco and Checkpoint firewalls.

Managed up to 20 different customer networks using VRF, VPN, and private Telecom circuits.

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, It

Bs, Computer Science

Bt In Electronics, Electronics

As, Electronics