Lead Operations Technician

Datto

February 2016 to Actually working here

Anything technical - from looking after millions of dollars of hardware in the datacenter, to mounting tv's or videoconferencing hardware. Two office space mergers and two office moves. Two datacenter buildouts with around 24 racks in melbourne and sydney. One datacenter migration from equinix sy3 to sy4 with around 15 racks.
Owned them all, but i wasn't the only person working on those.

System Administrator

Nominet UK

October 2011 to September 2013

As a result of the project work carried out over the year end 2010/2011, and additional work carried out by other external consultants through early 2011; Nominet embarked on a project to completely refresh the infrastructure behind the UK DNS servers. The budget for the project work was in the order of £10 Million. Nominet identified there was a need for additional SA resource to assist with "Business As Usual" while the existing SA team carried out the refresh and re-design work. Nominet approached me as a suitable candidate as I already knew about the diversity of the existing infrastructure and my "Can Do" attitude in the face of adversity was appreciated during the previous contract. I was responsible for supporting the diverse estate of over 300 servers. This estate was based mainly within the head office within Oxford, but also at the "Disaster Recovery" site at "The Bunker" in Ash in Kent, and seven other name server site locations throughout the Uk and europe. On a daily basis I could be logging onto Solaris (8 and 10), FreeBSD, Centos, RedHat, Ubuntu, Apple, Microsoft software on Intel or Sparc hardware. Fault finding software and hardware problems. I would also find it necessary to log onto Cisco, F5 and Juniper networking hardware and fault-find. I went on the "On Call" rota for a 9-month period, supporting the environment "out of hours" as required. I also carried out all of the backend "Registry Systems" software updates over a 6 month period, working closely with the software development team of 30. Over this period we migrated most of the C++ software on Solaris to Java on Centos/Redhat. At this stage it is probably worth pointing out that the infrastructure sounds complex, and it was. Diversity was very much the "name of the game" at Nominet, this was out of necessity. The systems I was supporting were key components of the UK DNS infrastructure. Upon completion of the "Re-Infrastructure" project I was retained by Nominet to continue in the role.

NOC Team Leader

Iomart

February 2011 to October 2011

Working very closely with a number of geographically diverse teams to ensure the successful relocation of 200 racks of equipment from an even more diverse geographical area to a new purpose-built data centre in Maidenhead. The diverse teams included 1 the NOC engineers of Rapidswitch in Maidenhead. 2 the Networking and NOC teams of IoMart in Glasgow 3 the Management and NOC teams of Titan Internet in Rochford, Essex. 4 Various other customer SA and IS teams I managed a team of 3 NOC engineers through the deployment of 200 equipment-ready racks of equipment. Starting from the shell of a data centre with no racking, we worked very closely with customers to enable the migration of equipment from a variety of external datacentres to the purpose-built datacentre in Maidenhead. Some of the equipment implemented "Cold Aisle" containment. Titan Internet was the main customer with over 100 racks of their own and customer equipment. Although NDA's prevent me from discussing specific details. The project was completed ahead of time, with minimum unexpected downtime.

Systems Administrator

Nominet UK

October 2010 to January 2011

Joined Nominet as a contractor to provide extra resource/assistance into the Systems Administration team as the team were taking on a number of high-profile projects: 1 Documenting SA processes and creating a library of "Standard Operating Procedures". 2 Documenting and carrying out an audit of the diverse hardware and software in use across the estate. 3 Using the audit data to create a hardware/software matrix of systems "at risk" or otherwise in need of hardware/software patching and prioritising the need to patch. And of course all of the above were carried out in conjunction with the "Software Development" and "Research" teams to interleave cleanly with the software release cycle and other maintenance tasks.

Network Manager

IA Computing

September 2006 to October 2010

Network Manager. I was initially employed to manage all aspects of the IT systems deployed throughout ?Chalfont Community College?. Having developed this site massively over two years I was re-deployed to develop the systems at ?The Beaconsfield School? and ?Faversham House Group? (One of the Uk?s leading New-Media Publishers). Both roles were busy in very different ways; Schools with approximately 500 workstations, over 150 laptops, 40+ projectors with whiteboards and a massive variety of applications. F.H.G. has near to 100 users split between two main site with a handful of home-based workers.

IT Manager

Hildon Water

November 2003 to November 2006

IT Manager. I was employed to support their Epicor ERP system, the Netware, Linux and Windows2000 servers; all the workstations, and bring online a number of unfinished projects from the Epicor implementation. Supporting the office user base of 40, in all aspects of IT from basic user training through workstation repair to implementing new enterprise-wide systems. My main project rollouts included Microsoft Exchange 2003 following a concept rollout of Linux based email. Terminal Server to roaming sales team using 3G technology. Concurrent Wan and Lan deployment of Enterprise Antivirus and Anti-Spyware.

Workshop Engineer

PCS

November 2002 to November 2003

Working in the workshop repairing a range of high-speed scanners, printers, and tape drives. I also developed an in-house stock management and tracking system

Support Analyst

Epicor Software Corp

November 2000 to November 2002

Epicor Software Corporation is the world's largest ERP software supplier focused exclusively on mid-market companies. I joined Epicor as Technical Analyst, to bring NT and Linux skills into the predominantly HP UX support team. The role focused mainly on technical support of the customer base numbering in excess of 1000. With exposure to database and software development methodologies.

Desktop Services Team Leader

Lincoln Financial Group

August 1999 to January 2001

Team leader of Desktop Services Uxbridge. Planned the Desktop Services aspect of the Closure of the Uxbridge office, but was offered a lucrative opportunity programming before I got the opportunity to implement the project.

Technical Support Engineer

Allied Worldwide

May 1998 to August 1999

Team leader and technical support for a team of 52 field service engineers.

Technical support engineer

Compusys

November 1996 to November 1998

As a "Technical Support Engineer" and "Account Manager" I was personally responsible for a number of vital accounts with various large corporate customers. Supporting their support teams at a hardware and software level on some very ?high end? equipment.

BEng

January 1997 to January 2000

Batchelor of Science

January 1996 to January 2000

Batchelor Of Science

January 1987 to January 1988

Career Goals

Team Leading in a hardware design Environment. Systems Management Manufacture Limited Resource planning and implementation Education-Specific resource planning

Industries of interest

Areas of interest

Availability to travel and work outside the city

No

Interests and hobbies

I'm a BSAC Scuba diver, I cycle, I play the guitar badly. I have an interest in technology (Duh!) I have some quite strong views on recycling and appropriate use of resources vs wastage.