Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology

Joe Smith is installing an Operating System on the transparent PC. We use this PC to teach PC hardware, to run our network management software, and to attract attention to our equipment and facilities.

A look at the inside of our transparent PC. This system is one of a kind, it was custom built by CNSA students and contains an Asus motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, has 3 drives in a hardware RAID 5 array providing over a Terabyte of storage, dual video cards, dual monitors, and a transparent cover on one of the disk drives that allows you to watch the heads fly across the disk platter as they read and write data.

This is a view of the CNSA Data Center - it is the heart of the CNSA Local Area Network. The equipment racks are filled with UPS systems, routers, Ethernet switches, servers, copper and fiber cable termination panels. Students in the CNSA program will come to understand everything in this room and be able to create and manage a room like this for their employer. 

This is a view of some of the Ethernet swithing equipment in the data center. The lower two units are layer 3 Ethernet switches with gigabit copper and fiber ports. The orange and greenish-blue cables on the right are fiber optic cables that comprise the gigabit backbone that interconnects the CNSA Lab area.

This photo is a rear view of the Cisco routers in the data center that we use to build a life-like Wide Area Network. Students learn how to administer the Cisco IOS and ultimately configure these routers to perform both static and dynamic IP routing. IP routing is what moves data packets  around the Internet.

This is Cody Martin checking to see if his fiber optic connector is transmitting light. Cody had just completed terminating a fiber optic connector onto a strand of multimode fiber optic cable.

Here's a look at a routine day in our lab area. Notice that equipment racks are not only located in the data center - we also have 10 additional live equipment racks in the lab area that provide LAN connections to all of the PC's in the lab area. Each equiprack rack connects to the main data center using gigabit fiiber Ethernet connections.