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Hi everyone, my name is Greg Williams.
I'm a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado,
Colorado Springs.
I wanted to introduce you to myself for a few minutes, and tell you a little bit
about these courses that you're going to be taking, and my passions in computers.
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It was running DOS at the time.
I changed the time on it because he couldn't figure it out.
So then, when I in high school start taking some C programming classes,
and then in college, my undergrad,
I got my information technology degree.
And then, got my masters in engineering and information assurance.
That's a computer science degree.
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Anyway, going back to where I came from in security,
I loved or I still do love playing video games.
And back in the early 2000s, me and
my friends would play Battlefield 1942.
And there was a Desert Siege MOD, that came out and
I would rewrite the memory locations, on the fly,
to turn the enemies a different color, so I could identify them easier.
So yes, I was a hacker back then.
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But that really started me into my computer security career because,
I was able to see that other people, like myself, had an advantage.
And how do I stop other people from gaining that advantage?
So now, I still play video games all the time.
Love playing first-person shooters like Battlefield.
Within the past week, I played Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 4 and like
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After the course, that is, after you've completed it,
then we'll set up a channel or something like that.
Anyway, So I've been the information
security officer here at the university, and the HIPAA security officer.
But my passion now is being able to
apply computer security into the systems that I managed.
So being the director of operations which includes telecom,
it includes all networking, it includes infrastructure for
a what we would call medium size university which is 13,000 students.
It gives me the opportunity to innovate again.
We're doing some really cool things.
So I'm going to take you into the data center right now,
where we're going to just look over a few of the things that get me really excited
about computer security and also system management.
But before we do that, what I want you to understand is that everything
that you're going to learn In these courses,
if you're just taking the system management and security specialization, or
if you're taking the practical computer security specialization.
What I want you to understand is that,
this is practical knowledge that I've had from years of experience.
I live and breathe this stuff every day.
You're going to walk into the data center here in a second and
see that this stuff really does exist.
This is really what I'm putting into practice, not just theory.
My teams live and breathe this stuff too,
so it's a combination of learning all the time but also practicing.
And I hope that you see that throughout these classes.
Let's go take a look at the data center.
Okay, this is our primary data center.
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We have a raised-floor system here.
Underneath the floor is 24 inches of space.
What that does is that allows cold air from the crack units behind me here
to be pushed down through the floor and cold air going up.
What that does is that pushes the hot air up to the ceiling.
The ceiling in this room is around 17 feet tall.
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We have quite a few standalone servers, but let's take you into where we
have a lot of rack mount units.
This is one of our newer racks.
Each one of the racks here,
contains almost half a million dollars worth of IT equipment.
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This is our SDN Stack, software-defined networking.
This is one of the really cool bleeding edge or
cutting edge technologies, that is out on the market today.
It's actually CISCO ACI.
What it does is it works with virtualization and
physical systems to software, well, based on the software,
route packets back and forth and do microsegmentation on the network.
It's actually the core of our network,
not which many universities have at the moment.
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Like I said in the previous couple of minutes ago,
this is just our primary data center.
We have four data centers on campus.
Some have more equipment in them, some have less.
We also have 54 buildings on campus.
Each one of them, look around like this.
This is our networking row.
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We have more standalone servers and network architecture in the back and
than even more, we could keep on going.
But, what I want you to understand out of the entire course,
as you're thinking about these videos and your'e watching these lectures and
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doing the work, think about how you are implementing this technology or
how you want to learn this technology for an organization.
Feel free to email me, I'll be more than happy to take a look at
whatever you have and help you out if I can.
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But keep in mind, I practice this stuff on a daily basis.
This isn't just me talking theory.
Most of the stuff that we talk about is
from situations that we've had here on campus or lessons learned.