Career Profile

Currently I am a Storage Architect with Thomson Reuters, Inc.

My current interests focus on storage and cloud based technologies and process. In brief, my background is a mixture of very large scale server environments, very large storage environments, high performance computing, and infrastructure software development.

Previously I was a Lead Storage Engineeer with Thomson Reuters. In this role my team and I leveraged new technologies to improve storage efficiency and manageability of a very large multi-petabyte environment. In this role I also assumed Storage Design and Storage Support Team Leader roles.

Prior to Thomson Reuters I was a Principal Consultant with GlassHouse Technologies specializing in enterprise storage. Responsibilities included storage services consulting and the development of infrastructure technology management software for use by GlassHouse and its customers.

Preceeding GlassHouse I was a Software Engineer for Cassatt, Inc. (a.k.a Unlimited Scale) where responsibilities included software development of installation software and prototyping an I/O fail-over feature for a Linux cluster based product. I also managed the source control and build environment (CVS), and worked with beta customers in professional service engagements.

I'm also a seasoned system administrator with over 15 years of experience supporting small to large UNIX installations; specializing in serving storage and software to the enterprise.

I am extremely interested in computer science with a focus on operating systems, network platforms (i.e. cloud) and storage. I have over the years enjoyed using my programming and system management skills to build tools and applications that examined and solved business and technical problems for my employers.

• Troubleshooting OS, hardware, network, storage, SAN, NAS, and application problems.
• Extensive Ruby on Rails development experience.
• Substantial experience supporting a variety of UNIX based operating systems including Linux, IRIX, Solaris, BSDI, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, Data OnTap, and FreeBSD.
• Experience supporting High Performance Computing clusters, associated software, and users.
• C, C++, Python, Ruby, and Perl programming experience and familiarity with other computer languages such as Fortran, Lisp, and Tcl
• Leveraging UNIX based systems and Open Source software to solve the business problems of small to large businesses.
• Experience with a variety of storage arrays, fibre channel switches, and deploying storage solutions in large production environments. EMC Symmetrix, HDS USP-V, VSP, NetApp, BlueArc, Sun 73xx Series (Amber Road), Sun ZFS, EMC CLARiiON, IBM SVC and DS-8K, Brocade, Cisco MDS, and Qlogic Switches.
• Designing and deploying enterprise scale backup and disaster recovery installations.
• Extensive experience writing IT services technical documentation for technical, business, and end users.
• Excellent mentoring, and team leadership skills.
• Strong customer service, and the ability to focus quickly on the problem and possible solutions.

Work Experience

March 21, 2011 - Present / Thomson Reuters

As a storage infrastructure architect I design storage service offerings from new technologies and process to deliver solutions to business units. This involves evaluating and characterizing new technologies and incorporating these technologies into larger infrastructure building blocks or service offerings.

Dec 02, 2010 - Mar 20, 2011 / Thomson Reuters

Team lead of the storage support team covering production storage assets.

Jun 21, 2010 - Dec 01, 2010 / Thomson Reuters

As the team lead of the storage design team, my role includes:

• Team Leader / Management responsibilities of 3 storage engineers
• Introducing new storage technologies into the implementation and support organization, including:


• NetApp Multistore/vFiler Technology
• Sun 7300 Series Storage Subsystems / ZFS
• BlueArc and Hitachi (HDS) NAS Filers
• Developing tools and automatation of common storage tasks to improve efficiency.
• Researching and implementing ideas which help improve the availability, performance, and utilization of storage.

May 05, 2009 - Jun 20, 2010 / Thomson Reuters

As a member of the storage optimization team, our group rolled out storage virtualization technologies (Hitachi USP-V and NetApp Multistore) to support increased utilization of storage capacity throughout the environment.

Oct 11, 2004 - Apr 27,2009 / Glasshouse Technologies

As a principal consultant, my emphasis has been on formalizing the operational aspects of enterprise infrastructure management and implementing technologies to support customer's business requirements. This includes developing processes and procedures to assure that reliability, performance, and operational requirements are met.

Additionally, this role included:

• Being a subject matter expert for multiple GlassHouse customers
• Process and procedure development relating to storage management
• Day to day provisioning of SAN & NAS storage (Storage device selection/creation, Zoning, LUN Masking)
• Supporting EMC Symmetrix DMX Arrays, NetApp Filers, SVC, DS-8300, and Centera storage devices for both Open Systems and iSeries IBM servers.
• Providing Volume Manager Support to server admins for Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows (VSFW)
• Troubleshooting, performance analysis, and issue escalation with vendors.
• Support of CIFS, iSCSI, and NFS protocols.
• Ruby on Rails software development of cost modeling and work flow applications.
• Management of Cisco MDS 9509, 9216, and 9120 Fibre Channel Switches
• Design and implementation of SAN Fabrics using VSANs and IVR to support operational and disaster recovery requirements.
• Day to day maintenance, monitoring, and reporting of key SAN metrics
• Providing storage related subject matter expertise to platform teams
• Creation and development of a software as a service (SaS) environment.
• Detailed knowledge of the following tools:
  1. SSL enabled Apache 2.x Servers and configuration
  2. VMWare ESX Configuration and support
  3. Ruby on Rails
  4. mongrel web server
  5. Bugzilla, Subversion, and Email server configuration and support
  6. Wiki deployment

Oct 25, 2002 - Oct 11, 2004 / Unlimited Scale, Inc. and then Cassatt, Inc.

As a software engineer, work involves software development on Linux operating system software related to our clustering product. Other activities include supporting product build and source control systems and providing technical assistance to our professional services organization.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Design and maintenance of product build systems
• Design and maintenance of packaging and installation software
• Design and implementation of a high availability I/O feature
• Liaison with channel partners for build and packaging issues
• Technical coordinator for engineering infrastructure
• Data center and lab design; including electrical and HVAC
• Responsible for VPN (FreeSWAN/IPSEC), WAN, LAN, and WIFI (802.11b/g) Networks
• Support iptables firewalls, Sendmail, Postfix, and BIND software
• Supported CVS Source Control Systems
• Utilized AMANDA and other tools to provide a backup/restore and disaster recovery solution
• Maintain NFS file servers, NIS, DHCP, and Apache web servers
• Support for IA32, IA64 Itanium (HP rx2600), and Alpha systems running RedHat Linux
• Utilized Linux multi-disk (md) on servers to provide enhanced data protection.

Dec 2001 - Oct 25, 2002 / Imation - Storage Professional Services

As a Senior SAN Engineer, work focused on a variety of storage related projects and customer engagements including performance analysis, troubleshooting, interoperability testing, disaster recovery planning, proof of concept testing, and new product certification. There was also participation in pre-sales research, test plan creation, and some project management activities.

Some specific highlights include:

• Regular interaction with enterprise customers.
• Proficient configuring Fibre Channel fabric switches (Brocade, Qlogic, etc.)
• Working with a variety of host bus adapters: Emulex, QLogic, JNI, Troika, LSI.
• Familiarity with a variety of storage arrays: CLARiiON/EMC, Compaq RA-8000, LSI E4000 Series, and Hitachi 9260.
• Configuring and maintaining network infrastructure equipment including: Cisco Catalyst 4000 series switches, Cisco Routers, Extreme Switches, PIX and IPF (BSD) based Firewalls.
• Maintaining internal DHCP and DNS servers.
• Supporting PPTP and SSH based VPN solutions.
• Working with iSCSI hardware and software. Cisco 5420 & 5428. Linux, Sun, and Windows hosts.
• Real world experience using Fibre Channel Analyzers. Finisar GTX, GTJ, and I-TECH.
• Experience working with file systems and volume managers including Sun UFS, XFS, VxFS, ext2fs, ext3fs, reiserfs, XLV, XVM, and LVM.
• Experience with multipathing software. Compaq SANWorks Secure Path and EMC ATF.
• Participating or leading a variety of SAN engagements using a variety of operating systems

Dec 2000 - Oct 2001 / BraVara Communications, Inc.

Responsible for all I.T. infrastructure in the Minnesota office. Maintained firewalls, storage, backups, Internet connectivity, DNS, wiring, telephones, and vendor relations. I was also electronic postmaster for the entire company.

• Maintained sendmail servers, IMAP servers (Cyrus & UW-IMAP), Mirapoint E-Mail appliance, and supported various mail user agents (mutt, elm, outlook and outlook express).
• Designed and implemented a web based information system to track employee accounts, contact information, and assets.
• Maintained desktops and servers running Linux, BSD OS 4.2, and Solaris 7 & 8. Automated common processes.
• Researched and recommended purchases of development hardware ranging from 1U IA32 systems for prototypes to Sun 280R systems for ASIC simulation purposes.

Jul 1996 - Dec 2000 / Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI)

Technical leader and mentor for a system administration team maintaining over 1000 UNIX desktop systems and over 30 servers. Supported IRIX, Linux, SunOS 4.x, and Solaris Operating systems on both client and servers. Other highlights include:

• Extensive experience with IRIX 5.3, 6.2 and 6.5.x on both server and desktop platforms.
• Worked on committees specifying and designing the campus client/server network architecture.
• Designed and implemented a campus wide backup/recovery system utilizing Legato Networker, SGI servers, and ATL storage libraries.
• Planned and executed major campus wide upgrades of desktop, server, and storage array OS software.
• Supported storage on UNIX servers utilizing single disks, host/software based RAID systems, and SGI/Clarion SCSI and Fibre Channel storage arrays.
• Maintained NFS, NIS, AutoFS, and Samba server software.
• Utilized Jumpstart (Solaris), Kickstart (Linux), and Roboinst (IRIX) to automate routine server and client installations.
• Cooperated and worked closely with development organizations to ensure that we were providing infrastructure meeting their needs.
• Automated routine tasks. Maintained and supported compilers, editors, debuggers and other development software.

Sep 1994 - Jun 1996 / University of Minnesota

Technical leader and mentor for 12-15 student employee system administrators. Our organization supported 7000+ student UNIX accounts and 3 major Institute of Technology computer labs. Specific responsibilities:

• Supported hardware and software for Sun, SGI, HP, and Linux desktops located in the major campus computer labs.
• Electronic Postmaster for 7000+ accounts. Designed, implemented and supported an email system consisting of multiple email hubs spanning 3 University departments.
• Participated in the design and roll-out of the University's first ATM network.
• Improved network security by developing policies to deal with security incidents, quickly applying security patches, and utilizing intrusion detection techniques.
• Improved our organization's ability to scale by reducing the number NIS domains, flattening UIDs and GIDs, using the Modules environment modification software, automating system installations, and by making the labs as homogeneous as possible.
• Supported a research parallel computing lab consisting of SGI Challenge servers on HiPPI, Ethernet, Fibre Channel (IP), and ATM networks. Supported OS software, networking, PVM, MPI, and load balancing software.
• Deployed the AMANDA backup package to handle all backup system needs. Trained student operators in both backup and restore procedures.
• Deployed terminal servers to allow for remote console management.
• Worked with peers to forecast and specify future laboratory and production server needs.

Jun 1992 - Sep 1994 / Cray Research, Inc.

Worked as a member of the Sun Resource group providing front line support to Sun, SGI, and Cray users. Provided customer support specializing in compilers, debuggers, NFS, NIS, and Email software. Designed and wrote a sophisticated on-line customer survey tool in C++ which provided valuable feedback from our customer base. Also:

• Supported public domain software applications. Installed, maintained, and supported GCC/G++, GDB, Emacs, X11, Motif, and Elm.
• Installed and supported Sun C & C++ compilers. Worked with engineers to reproduce bugs and escalated bugs to Sun Microsystems when necessary.
• Supported hardware and software on over 30 Sun Servers and 1500 Sun desktops. This included SPARC Center 1000, 2000, Cray CS6400, ELC, and SPARC 5 systems.
• Wrote a variety of perl, shell and C programs to automate routine system administrative tasks.
• Worked as a co-specialist supporting NFS, NIS, AutoFS, and Sendmail.

Jun 1990 - Jun 1992 / University of Minnesota

Supported the computer science department graduate student laboratory. Maintained 20 Sun systems and 2 NeXT Cubes. Additional activities involved:

• Working as a system operator answering phone and email requests from customers. Running daily backups using locally developed software.
• Supporting and installing X11/GNU products from source code on a variety of platforms.

Jun 1989 - Jun 1990 / University of Minnesota

Worked as a lab consultant in the Institute of Technology Computer Science Laboratory. Primary responsibilities included:

• Providing assistance to computer science and engineering students with the UNIX, VAX, and CDC user and programming environments.
• Tutoring and helping students with C, Pascal, Fortran 77, and assembly language programming problems.
• Troubleshooting problems with PCs, MACs, Sun 3/50, and SPARC 1/1+ Workstations.

Education

• Senior, University of Minnesota, Institute of Technology / Computer Science. Not currently enrolled. 195 current credits.
• EMC Control Center Management Course - April 2005
• EMC SAN Management Course - May 2005
• EMC SRDF Business Continuity - Oct 2005
• EMC Symmetrix Configuration Management - Nov 2005
• Fibre Channel Training Course from Solution Technology, Inc. - June 2002
• LISA System Administration Courses 1994, and 1997

Other Activities / Experience

• Jun 1985 - Jun 1987 - U.S. Army/Military Policeman. Served in the Republic of Panama, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Received the Army Achievement, Over Seas, and Good Conduct Medals. Honorable discharge.
• Jun 1987 - Honorary Citizen of Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica. for participation in the Puentes de La Paz project
• May 2002 - Professional PADI SCUBA Instructor. PADI IDC Staff Instructor, Master SCUBA Diver Trainer, and Master SCUBA Diver ratings.
• Aug 2003 - Technical SCUBA Diver. TDI Advanced Trimix, Trimix, Advanced Nitrox, Gas Blender, and Decompression Procedures Ratings.
• Sep 2006 - Licensed United States Parachute Association (USPA) Skydiver. 325+ jumps. Currently holding USPA-A and USPA-B licenses.
• Dec 2004, Mar 2008 - Emergency First Aid, CPR, and AED Instructor (PADI)
• May 1984 - 2nd Place Award / Data Processing & Programming Division A Competition. WWTI LaCrosse, WI.
• On going - I run a semi-production environment at my house providing email and web services to a small group of my friends using Cyrus IMAPD, Postfix, FreeBSD, Linux, iptables, and a host of other Open Source software.

References

Available upon Request