SUMMARY:

• A proven leader and determined VMware engineer with extensive cross training in all leading cloud technologies.
• With over fifteen years of experience as a consultant, business owner and strong customer advocate, I have labored to create a proven track record for achieving on - time and within budget success on my projects no matter the pressure or difficulty.
• My working experience revolves around all forms of virtualization and cloud from VMware ESX 2.0 to present, but I am very well versed in Windows Server System, Enterprise Linux and many different vertical applications; I have used these skills to fulfill business objectives that competing engineers believed were impossible many times throughout my career.
• I have had the privilege of working for many different organizations and vertical markets ranging from manufacturing, service, healthcare, municipal government, law enforcement and logistics.
• As a result, I am well versed in today’s “hot button” compliance issues and how to solve them best with technology.
• I am a VCP6-DCV and have been a VCP since version 3.0.
• I have also worked with OpenStack, Eucalyptus, AWS, Google App Engine, Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop. It is a point of pride to me to remain conversant with nearly all best of breed virtualization management and augmentation products available today.
• I am also a voracious reader, writer and proven technical analyst which gives me an edge as a global thinker.
• I am a Meyers-Briggs ENTJ with a reasonable degree of emotional intelligence and high aptitude scores in both technology and sales. (Assessments available upon request.)
• I thrive under pressure and am highly motivated. When I accept an engagement, my wage buys my loyalty to my employer and my pride commands absolute dedication to my employer’s goals.
• I plan on achieving my certified ethical hacker and updating my MCSE to present, as well as following one or more vSphere tracks to the final tier over the next six months but am flexible to fit an employer’s needs.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Virtualization: VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, Network Virtualization, Qemu, Open Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, Docker

Virtualized Appliances and Management: VMware NSX, Automation, Replication, Log Insight, Thin App, Configuration Manager, Hyperic, Mirage

Virtualization Support: Altaro, VeeamVirtual Desktop Infrastructure: Early and continuous involvement with VDI and later View and XenDesktop. I have kept thisskill at peak competency.

Cloud: OpenStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyputs, Chef, Puppet, Docker, Vagrant, Redit, MongoDB, CouchDB, Serf. Google App Engine, Amazon AWS and Rackspace.

VMWare: Lifetime knowledge of VMware ESX & ESXi. View, Lab Manager, SRM, Horizon, Cloud Suite.Special expertise in hybrid cloud.

Disaster Recovery: Planned, Implemented and Tested Geographic hot & warm site failover for several projects throughout my career.

Windows Server Systems: From SS 2000 through 2012R2 & Exchange 2013.

Active Directory: Including integration with OpenDirectory, Security design on RODC's and Novell.

Firewalls, Security Hardening: JunOS, ScreenOS, CiscoIOS, Cisco PIX & ASA, Sonicwall, Palo Alto, Watchguard, Snort, Smoothwall, Software Defined Network Appliances.

Data Center Design and Implementation: Experience on every framework of datacenter deployment from IBM system Z & I to and networking.Top of Rack, Cooling & Power Design, Security Infrastructure, RBAC.

Technical Writing: Technical analysis, meticulous documentation.

Compliance and Auditing: Experience with HIPAA, CJIS & FIPS, ISO13485, Sarbanes Oxley. Assisted or directly lead compliance mandates for customers in various public, private and non-profit industries.

LINUX Servers: Centos, Arch, Scientific, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, CoreOS, Mandriva, FreeBSD

Enterprise System Deployment: Linux, Windows Server System, Solaris, Novell and integration between them.

CITRIX: XenServer 5.5 & 6, XenDesktop 5 & 6, Metaframe XP, Presentation Server Farm Configuration 3 & 4. XenApp when rebranded.

Wide Area Networking: Some deficiencies in BGP and SONET configuration on Cisco equipment but conceptual understanding allows me to be effective anyway.

IT Operations: ITIL Foundation Coursework, Service Delivery Maxim and Strong work ethic.

ERP: Well versed in Epicor 9/10, Netsuite, JD Edwards. Successfully implemented E9 nearly solo.

Enterprise Networking: Infiniband, Fiber 4, 8. Sas 3, 6. iSCSI 1GBe & 10GBe.

Databases: TSQL, MSSQL 2000-2014, MYSQL, PERVASIVE, SYBASE, PROGRESS, MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, RabbitMQ

Personal: Strong listening skills, total analysis of client position leads to comprehensive solutions specification. Great Leadership skills

CISCO: Originally strong on PIX / ASA. A refresher course is in order.

JUNIPER: Originally strong on ScreenOS & NSM. Skills are mostly still present.

Business Process Analysis: UML modeling competency.

ERP: Implementations are process driven from start to finish. Singularly responsible for modeling and approving every departmental process adopted during E9 implementation.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential

Lead Consultant / Technical Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Entered the SMB technology solutions arena in less than six weeks while maintaining analytical and print revenue streams.
• Created meaningful partnerships with top vendors, synergistically driving customer value while strongly meeting first-year revenue goals. Much of my success has been due to using best of breed, cutting-edge technology to garner maximum benefit for customers without excessive cost.
• Closed over $120,000 in new business in 2014 and continued to grow new business at a similar rate through the present.
• Aggressively handled client projects and managed vendors to meet and exceed customer expectations.
• Retained nearly 80% of gross revenue via carefully structured relationships with hardware and software vendors, strong client management skills and thorough contract negotiation.
• Worked extensively with VMware vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 on diverse projects including consolidation, automation, hybrid cloud.
• Managed XenDesktop, XenApp and Microsoft RDS services farms for approximately five hundred users.
• Worked extensively to migrate applications to hybrid and public cloud: AWS, Google App Engine and Digital Ocean.
• Became proficient with Kubernetes, Chef, Docker and numerous other cloud automation protocols both proprietary and open source.
• Worked extensively in the legal vertical market developing expertise in both the technology required to run law practices successfully and how to frame and market them to the public.

IT Director

Responsibilities:

• Successfully devised, planned and implemented a total ERP replacement serving over five hundred employees in two countries, completing the project on time and within budget. Simultaneously spearheaded and implemented an MPLS driven, SIP trunked, Mitel IP telephony system connecting the Dominican Republic to New London, CT with a single extension scheme and vastly improved functionality leading to heightened communications between the two manufacturing facilities.
• Lead the deployment of Epicor 9 ERP, a notoriously resource intensive application. Using PCIe SSD’s to satisfy a mixed Progress and SQL database back end enabled excellent clock in/clock out performance, while the use of four way AMD Opteron Sledgehammer 16 core chips, 256GB of memory and multiple load balanced application servers kept performance quite good on average. I was able to cut the hardware cost from $750,000 to $250,000 by using non-standard architecture techniques. Further, by leveraging a competitive bid process between SuperMicro, Dell and HP, I was able to reduce that $250,000 infrastructure investment to just over $75,000, effectively paying for more than ¾ of the total user licensing.
• Successfully devised, planned and implemented a total enterprise resource planning replacement system serving over five hundred employees in two countries on time and within budget.
• Built and customized a custom payroll integration that fulfilled Dominican Republic withholding and tax structures.
• Utilized proven communications and rapport building skills to satisfy director level stakeholders and successfully resolve conflicts while leveraging four direct reports to keep business technology sound throughout the project.
• Strategically sourced high-quality hardware, consulting and labor resources at enormous savings through clever architectural design and extremely careful vendor management.
• Negotiated and installed SLA protected MPLS circuits at one third of quoted cost by communicating directly with the director of L3 communications, Mr. Story, when his salesmen misrepresented the price of the circuit and refused to honor the deal they initially presented.
• Implemented the project on time and in budget despite the timetable being pushed forward six months by executive management.
• Successfully orchestrated a bilingual training program to run concurrently with implementation to educate workers on over fifty new labor tracking terminals.
• Implemented a fully VMware virtualized, Mitel IP telephony system concurrently with the ERP project. At the time Mitel was the only vendor completely virtualized.
• Successfully completed numerous other projects including XenServer 5.5 to VMware vSphere 5 total infrastructure migration, Exchange and Active Directory migration to Windows server System 2012/Exchange 2013. Devised automated failure responses for ERP systems using Systems Center Orchestrator.
• Tested failover to Phoenix Nap cloud storage variously using using both Veaam and Zerto driven by Microsoft Systems Center Orchestrator.
• Used Kemp, F5 and Microsoft Network Load Balancing to regulate application server load.
• Deployed Nagios and Netflow collectors and analysis engines to alert on network problems pre-emptively and where possible took automated action via Orchestrator.

Sr. Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Collaborated with customer stakeholders and internal sales resources to deliver cutting-edge technical pre-sales, design and implementation services for diverse organizations in government, private sector and non-profit.
• Successfully virtualized thousands of physical servers on ESX 2.0 - 4.0. At that time, Microsoft did not provide support to virtualized environments, consequently I was the final point of escalation.
• Successfully designed and implemented a twenty-five node, managed Juniper wide area network topology built on Juniper ScreenOS and Netscreen Security Manager.
• Became a subject matter expert on CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Systems) regulations, successfully designing, planning and implementing a CJIS / FIPS compliance initiative, addressing all major compliance issues present at a large municipal police organization. After five months of work, I defended the organization successfully against audit by the FBI scoring in the 90th percentile.
• Systems included biometric authentication, intrusion detection via Snort and Netscreen and deep packet inspection. Revised physical security procedures, server hardening with security profiles and extensive logging and alerting. Maintained centralized logging of IDS data via Juniper Netscreen Security Manager, Snort, RHEL and Sawmill custom reporting.
• Disaster Recovery - Utilized Synchronous and Asynchronous replication techniques, VMware Site Recovery Manager, Microsoft System Center Orchestrator and ESX ranger to implement warm site disaster recovery programs inclusive of crucial documentation and regular testing procedures.
• Drew on proven analytical and strategic skills to drive project success and customer satisfaction, acquiring new skills as needed to meet project requirements.
• Earned a reputation as the "engineer of last resort" as a result of consistently resolving high-pressure, unplanned crisis situations for clients with serious failures.
• Successfully resolved severe DNS and NTFRS issues on domain controllers in eight countries in only two days.
• Became proficient on most Linux distributions spearheading projects that required Linux application servers.
• Also worked with Solaris, FreeBSD and other uncommon variants frequently.

Sr. Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Progressed from a desktop technician to a systems engineer in less than one year; became Microsoft certified. (MCSE+Security on 2003 server system.)
• Identified opportunities, wrote proposals and implemented effective small business solutions independently.
• Became VMware certified in 2004, becoming one of the first engineers in the state of Connecticut to lead large server consolidation projects for both public and private sector clients.
• Designed total server consolidation solutions for public and private sector customers, virtualizing thousands of legacy servers at sites such as New London Public School System. Much of the hardware I dealt with during this time was old, problematic and often required significant determination to succeed at the consolidations.
• Collaborated with customer stakeholders and internal sales resources to deliver cutting-edge technical pre-sales, design and implementation services for diverse organizations in government, private sector and non-profit.