Mahanth Perla

Senior engineer for a mission-critical healthcare network spanning 2 hospital campuses and 20+ SD-WAN remote sites under 24×7 clinical operations — leading SD-Access architecture, multi-vendor fabric delivery, and identity-based access control where patient-care systems demand zero downtime.

• 01
  SD-Access Fabric Deployment Planned and executed end-to-end deployment of SD-Access enterprise network services on a VXLAN-based fabric — migrating 2,000+ endpoints from VLAN segmentation to 802.1X authentication with SGT/SGACL micro-segmentation.
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• 02
  Access Layer Build-Out Independently deployed 50+ access switches during the brownfield-to-SDA migration — racking, stacking, base configuration, DNAC onboarding, and LACP port-channel uplinks — while supporting a parallel greenfield site build.
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• 03
  Zero-Outage Data Center Migration Executed a full data center migration with zero production outages, sequencing cutovers across redundant paths and validating failover at every stage.
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• 04
  Cisco ISE Policy Engineering Engineered ISE policy (802.1X, AAA, RADIUS, TACACS+, device profiling) and contributed to an ISE infrastructure refresh; deployed TAP-based visibility with Armis and Asimily for IoT and medical device security.
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• 05
  Incident Command Led incident response for production outages across BGP, OSPF, DHCP/DNS, ISE, and physical layer — root-causing via packet captures, SNMP, and routing data, including a BMS outage resolved with an L2 flooding design that avoided a vendor rollback.
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• 06
  Change Management in Clinical Environments Drove change management for IOS-XE upgrades and policy rollouts in live clinical environments — staged testing, vendor and facilities coordination, and DNAC templates standardized to prevent configuration drift.
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• 07
  Documentation & Knowledge Transfer Maintained deployment runbooks, network topology documentation, and configuration standards supporting design reviews, audits, and team knowledge transfer.
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• 08
  IOS Upgrade Validation Framework Built a Python framework automating pre/post-upgrade configuration validation, config diffing, and endpoint-state snapshots — ensuring zero silent endpoint loss across upgrades.
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• 09
  Switch Config Generator Built an Excel/VBA tool that generates standardized base configurations from IP/hostname inputs — used to provision 50+ switches during the SDA migration with no manual per-device work.
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• 10
  Traffic Flow Visualizer Built a packet-capture tool that renders Sankey diagrams of conversations, ports, and protocols for at-a-glance traffic analysis and operational reporting.
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• 11
  Port & Optics Auditing Built tooling that flags inactive ports for capacity planning and validates SFP type consistency across link ends using CDP data.
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• 12
  Silent Host Recovery & ISE Endpoint Analyzer Built automation that source-pings the SDA fabric to recover silent BMS/IoT hosts, plus a web-based reporting tool over ISE endpoint exports to accelerate profiling review.
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