Working on "the dark side" (DevOPS) supporting EA Social Gaming infrastructure hosted by the Amazon Web Service platform. A challenging, fast-paced role, requiring personalities able to offer/implement effective and globally scalable solutions utilising "bleeding edge" technologies. Implemented EAs compliance to the FaceBook SSL requirements for FB applications. Taking into considering the short notice, I am also proud to be a member of the team that addressed Amazon's pre-Christmas directive to reboot ~2000 servers, with minimal impact to the business. As part of the DevOPS team, I was embedded within Analytics data warehouse development, managing Hadoop/Hive clusters used for the map/reduction of user activities and subsequent presentation through the MicroStrategy BI suite.

Brought on board primarily to rollout and support the retailer SOA platforms and the eCommera data centres, implementation of a DR suite and the subsequent migration of production to DR, this was an interesting and challenging role. Cisco firewalls were used to secure network traffic to the data centres, with F5 Big-IP load balancers offering LB and HA services to Weblogic 9.2 and 10gR3 and FTP/SFTP clusters. Both OCFS2 and EMC iSCSI SAN/NAS was utilised for storage within the clustered environments. Virtualisation through VMware ESX allowed for consolidation of physical data centre resources. Guest OSes included: RHEL, SLES, OpenSuSE and Windows. All technologies were fully integrated with OpenLDAP for the purposes of authentication. Service buses were implemented with AquaLogic 2.6 and OSB 10gR3 with a MS SQL Server 2005 cluster providing persistent storage. Also, managed Active Directory forests for both retailer platforms and office infrastructure. Fulfilled Database Administration role: MS SQL Server and MySQL. The Atlassian suite (JIRA, Confluence) was used for ticketing and collaboration. Also, provided 3rd line support for all the above technologies and systems.

Responsible for the company infrastructure, emphasis has been placed on fault tolerance, flexibility and “zero maintenance”. Establishing a solid, fault tolerant foundation through introducing SAN storage, HA and clustering technologies. Consolidation/centralisation of disparate resources has been achieved via LDAP and Enterprise Management tools. This, combined with the introduction of dynamic DNS integrated with the existing DHCP services, significantly reduced the administrative effort required to maintain the company infrastructure. The review and subsequent execution of extensive firewall, network and MTA reconfiguration practically eliminated the influx of spam email and network intrusions. Provision of virtualised (VMware Server) systems has afforded flexibility in reproducing customer operational environments thereby enhancing the product delivered by Aptus to their clientele. Consulting services have also provided to clients including British Telecom and Clifford Chance. In addition to strong problem solving skill set, this role required great flexibility and in-depth knowledge of numerous aspects of IT.

Planned and established a data centre for a new OHIM site. This included hardware procurement and a consolidation of mass storage through the implementation of a SAN, with mission critical data replicated between sites. Storage (arrays and the HDS LUNs) was managed with Veritas Volume Manager and Sun ODS. Significantly increased system availability by the elimination of inter-system dependencies (NFS mounts) and provision of replicated production environments. Improved Oracle database performance and reduced recovery times through the migration of data files to raw devices, coalescing fragmented tablespaces and the utilisation of archive logging. Reduced the 'cost of ownership' of the Solaris estate by extensive scripting to automate/simplify many aspects of administration and reporting. Additionally, an NIS+ domain was put in place to minimise the administrative effort of user, host and service configuration. Minimised OS installation and upgrade times by establishing a Jumpstart server that installed a per-system tailored set of packages and patches. In lieu of the implementation of a centralised backup solution, designed and authored backup/recovery procedures utilising a variety of tape devices (DDS through to DLT). In addition to Solaris, took on additional administrative duties including that of: SAP; FileNet; Weblogic; Oracle and, to some extent Informix. Also, provided 3rd line support, liaising with the Help Desk and Developers. The following courses were completed: Hitachi HDS, SAP, Weblogic and FileNet Administration.

Provided OMC-R support for new hard and software with emphasis on the High Availability aspects of the system (hard and software RAID solutions in combination with security backup procedures). Reduced the cost, and simplified the process of hardware upgrade to the client by providing the facilities to migrate system configuration from their existing systems. Liaised with IIV test centres in France, customer managerial and technical staff (China, France and UAE) to resolve installation and configuration issues (both hard and software) and obtain feedback required to improve the effectiveness of subsequent deliveries. Produced Dossier Equipments, a reference to engineers for the assembly of the hardware platforms to support the OMC-R. Also, made significant contributions to the end-user Installation and Administration guides.

A demanding position within a prestigious European bank, requiring the analysis and documentation of the development/test/production environment interfaces in order to implement processes to effect the ordered control of changes to both software and documentation within the bank's Information Systems. The ClearCase source code control tool was introduced as the source repository and change delivery mechanism for the systems (a Smalltalk GUI on NT with a Unix/Oracle backend). A high profile activity within a high profile project, called for long working hours and continual liaison with Developers, Production staff and the Cedel Management to ensure success.

Managed the build and subsequent maintenance of multiple concurrent releases of ALCATEL's OMC-R product. The very large scale distributed GSM management system included multiple OSI communications stacks, a Motif GUI, Oracle RDBMS, various third party products and approximately 10,000 RPC functions managing a heterogeneous network. Significantly reduced the time to turnaround product releases and patches by complete documentation and subsequent redesign of the build environment with zero impact on the normal development cycle.

This, a very high pressure environment, required the development of enhancements, conforming to the UK Government's new Commission Disclosure regulations, of Information Systems supporting Barclays financial businesses. In addition to conformance, the new Unix/INGRES based systems had to maintain compatibility with Barclays legacy systems.

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Computer Science BSc Hon, Computer Science