While completing my Computer Science degree at North Carolina State
University, I worked part-time at Da Vinci Systems, then a leading E-Mail
software vendor headquartered in Raleigh. I had previously been exposed to
networked computer systems in the academic environment, and had learned to
leverage NCSU's computing environment as I pursued my degree; but Da Vinci
gave me my first exposure to business-oriented networks and the challenges
and opportunities they represented.
My experiences working for the Raleigh branch of Computer Task
Group and elsewhere prepared me for my first full-time network
administrator position with the State, where I successfully
delivered reliable networking services to the Raleigh Regional
Office of the Department of Environment, Health and Natural
Resources (DEHNR, now known as DENR). During this time, I began to
expand my knowledge by purchasing my own Sun SPARCstation and
learning SunOS (aka Solaris v1.x) system administration.
After transferring to the Archdale Building and DEHNR's central
Computing Services Division, I took a position with the Department
of Public Instruction (DPI), serving in roles such as the
Section Chief for Network Engineering (a supervisory position) and
also Senior Network Engineer. In 1999, I became part of the original
team designing NC WISE, and served as the Technical Architect of the
project until 2000.
I began a 3-year return to the private sector in 2000, as a
network engineering consultant with Lucent Technologies and, after
Lucent's implosion, as a self-employed consultant. My projects
included Sun server configuration, CiscoSecure implementation,
network analysis and design, and managing the NC CATS online
testing project for DPI.
In 2003, I joined the Department of Revenue as a Network Engineer,
and established a track record of successful project
implementations and developing solutions to difficult issues. In
3Q2005, my job scope shifted to eCommerce platform
management, and included leading SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
(SLES) deployments on a variety of hardware platforms.
In 2Q2006, I transferred to NC Information Technology Services,
where my current responsibilities encompass design, implementation
and management of nearly 400 Linux systems for more than a dozen
customers, across 20+ different projects and application environments.
I continue to expand my skills in these areas as well
as information security and BC/DR planning.
From 2009 to 2018, I was a leading participant in exploring virtualization
technologies for Linux, including using the KVM and VMware platforms.
In addition, I served the primary staff member responsible for the design and
implementation of a Nagios-based monitoring solution for 450+ Linux, UNIX
and Windows hosts, development of a central user account
management solution for the Linux and UNIX environments, and also lead the
use of a Wiki as a knowledge-transfer and internal documentation tool.
In May of 2018, I joined the State's Enterprise Business Services
group, which provides SAP services for major Financial Systems of Record.
The organization was preparing to migrate from an AIX/DB2 on Power7 environment
to a green field of Linux/HANA 2.0 on Power9. Over the past 3 years, I have designed and
deployed a reliable, manageable SLES for SAP v15 environment across
dozens of LPARs (and even more x86_64 VMs for NetWeaver). I write more extensively about
this topic on my
Personal Projects page