Qualifications, Training Etc.
Courses whilst at Xafinity Paymaster:
FOX IT One Day ITIL v3 Presentation Course
Courses attended whilst at BAA:
Entrust Authority Security Manager Comprehensive (5 day course)
One day IT Service Management (ITSM) Simulation Event, incorporating ITIL
MS Active Directory course 2279B
HP OVO on Unix for Operators course H4358SC.01-SG
Courses attended whilst at Amadeus Marketing:
Internetworking with TCP/IP (through QA Training & Consulting)
Certifications achieved: CCNA, N+, MCSE (NT4), MCP (Win2K)
My MCSE/MCP exams taken were: Network Essentials, NT Workstation, NT Server, NT Server in the Enterprise, MS TCP/IP, MS IIS 4.0 and Win2k Professional.
College Course (Crawley College): GNVQ Advanced in Information Technology
My GNVQ covered a broad range of IT subjects such as I.T. in Society to Program Design.
College Course (Crawley College): BTEC First Diploma in Aeronautical Studies
My BTEC covered varied subjects such as technical design drawings and engineering.
Career Summary
Experience of working in a variety of industries, including Consultancy, Investment Banking \ Financial & business critical environments within enterprise wide IT infrastructures. I enjoy working in teams and on my own initiative, delivering and designing technical solutions, completing projects and tasks as required. Having the ability to grasp new IT concepts quickly, I am now looking to use my skills and experience within a suitably challenging and enjoyable role. Native English speaker with some European language skills, predominantly Spanish, I have experience of working in different countries and would travel as required.
April 2014 – October 2014
Company: IBM (Telefonica – UK & Spain)
Position: Infrastructure Technical Architect
At IBM I worked on the Telefonica Pan-European Midrange Transformation Programme. Working across multiple work streams I was pre-dominantly tasked as Discovery Lead for the UK (travelling to Spain when needed). I defined discovery data requirements together with the Central Team in Spain that allowed for input into the Discovery Repository, Roadmap and technical documentation for application \ services that were to be transitioned \ migrated to Spain.
Services \ Applications were migrated using a Stage Gate process with relevant deviations from architectural design principles captured and Change Requests raised whilst delivering “Technical Designs”. Migration Patterns and “Technical papers” including As-Is and To-Be details were also delivered.
RFP \ RFS documents, along with on-going discovery data from multiple sources (SME’s, CMDB’s, Asset Registers etc), were used for Roadmap Development, with appropriate changes \ differences raised and managed with the client. DC audits allowed for additional scope to be recognised and presented back to the client with appropriate application complexity definitions created according to specifically defined criteria. Bottom-Up (server components) and Top-Down (Business function \ Service) discovery approach was used to qualify further services that were to be transitioned.
Key technologies I was involved in were: Business Objects, Windows, SQL, VMWare, AWS, Solaris, Oracle, BMC ADDM, BMC Atrium.
September 2013 – April 2014
Company: Capgemini (London)
(DLG and RBS)
Position: Technical Design Authority
At Capgemini I worked on the DLG Migration Programme in which DLG infrastructure from RBS was being Transitioned over into Capgemini Data Centres. Involved in the complete migration cycle from initial analysis of discovery data and definition of migration method through to technology \ data transfer and final service cutover. This was a large Transition Programme in which the core focus for me was the delivery of Design Solutions for DLG’s Insurance and Risk services. The role was customer facing, working onsite at customer sites, also from home when need be and at CapGemini offices. Presentations of solutions and there progression for both internal and external stakeholders was actioned on a regular basis.
I worked across the following 3 work streams for the programme:
DC Readiness – Design of the Target DC Architecture to allow for sufficient and correct services to be available to host DLG Applications.
Application Migration – Delivery on DLD and AMS (Application Migration Specification) documentation for specific DLG applications.
Shared Services – Cluster, Virtual hosting, Web Farm and other Shared Services were defined in order to pre-dominantly expedite migrations but also re-use infrastructure, minimise technology foot prints. Availability Classes were defined for any new services (RTO’s, RPO’s etc), with specific services being published in the service catalogue having gone through review.
There was a large amount of analysis, with the definition of different migration methods (Clone, Rebuild, Virtualize etc), with decision trees being defined in order to determine server level migration methodology.
A definitive PCI-DSS compliancy requirement had to be adhered to, and through the use of 3-Tier Architecture application components were designed appropriately, with components being placed in the relevant network zone (Trusted, Semi-Trusted, Secure).
The overarching Target Operating Model and Design Standards and Principles were always considered with the production of any designs. Designs were submitted to the AGB (Architectural Governance Board), with appropriate actions being taken after feedback.
BoM (Bill of Materials) and RAIDE logs (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies & Exclusions) were completed within designs as part of design templates.
My technical responsibilities were pre-dominantly Windows \ VMWare but there was a large amount of involvement with non-Windows technologies. Core technologies utilised where:
– Windows Infrastructure (Windows Server, MS SQL, IIS etc)
– F5 Networking
– Digital Certificates
– VMware vSphere 5.1 (VMWare Hybrid Server \ vCloud Suite)
– EMC Storage (VMAX, Timefinder)
– Connect:Direct, Mainframe, Unix
– Glasshouse Reflector (Discovery CMDB)
April 2013
Company: Wunderman (London)
Position: AWS Cloud Architect
Currently working on architecting an enterprise scale Web and CMS (Content Management System) environment for a major auto manufacturer & digital media organisation (utilising a hybrid cloud model). Evaluation of variant Cloud vendors (AWS, Rackspace, VMWare vCloud Suite) and cloud-based security offerings was actioned. Definition of business requirements was made with regular reporting and interaction with stakeholders. Migration of MS Windows Technologies and CMS (Umbraco) into the cloud with relevant Architectural deliverables. Provision of high level Architectural Infrastructure documents incorporating the enterprise (customer and vendors). HLD and DLD documentation, gap analysis-use of business scenarios, functional and non-functional architectural deliverables: Architectural Security Documents, DR Design (BCP: HA-Avoidance of SPOF).
Selection of AWS was made as an IaaS provisioning solution after initial discovery was actioned and business requirements gathered. Input into the Architectural Roadmap was made. Variant Architectural options along with benefits and restrictions (Hybrid\Private Cloud, Single\Multi-Tenancy options etc) were provided.
Technical project components were:
– Hands-on use of Amazon Management Console, Zadara SAN and Windows Technologies.
– AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) \ Auto-Scaling usage for elastic scaling and performance enhancements.
– AWS EBS (Elastic Block Storage – Provisions IOPS configurations) Instance Store, S3, Amazon Glacier storage components utilised.
– Zadara Storage (CSaaS – Cloud Storage As A Service) NFS and iSCSI configurations utilised for higher IOPS where needed and geo-replication for DR.
– AWS Networking\VPC(Virtual Private Cloud),VPC Subnets (spanning Availability Zones), Security Groups, ENI (Elastic Network Interface),EIP (Elastic IP), VPG (Virtual Private Gateway), Direct Connect.
– CloudFront and Akamai comparisons for CDN (Content Delivery Network) solutions.
– AWS Security with IAM, MFA Hardware and VPC components.
– Windows Server 2012, IIS 8.0, Windows NLB.
– Windows SQL Server clustering with AWS.
– MS Active Directory components within AWS.
December 2012
Company: EMC (Saudi Arabia)
(Ministry of Higher Education)
Position: Technical Architect
DR Project – After the acquisition of a new DR site there was a requirement to provision an Active \ Active DR solution for relevant services, offering Near to Zero downtime where possible, considering DRTO \ DRPO expectations for individual application \ infrastructure services. Multiple technology layers were considered from SAN, Networking, Virtualisation (Hyper-V & VMware), Windows and Application. Initial current state analysis of infrastructure was undertaken with SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM tools being utilised. Relevant technology owners and stakeholders were consulted along with existing architectural infrastructure documentation to acquire appropriate discovery data. Business services were recognised and with use of discovery data the relevant baseline architecture was defined with deliverables such as HLD’s. Core technical components involved were:
– Active Directory \ Domain Controller Infrastructure
– Server 2008 Clustering (Quorum definition, Geo\Multisite-Clustering)
– Unix Clustering (Solaris & HACMP-AIX)
– Sharepoint (MOSS Farm Infrastructure)
– SCOM & SCCM 2012
– AWS Infrastructure (EC2, S3, ELB & VPC components were utilised)
– Exchange Server 2010
– SQL Server 2008
Business scenarios were utilised along with previously gather performance metrics to perform gap analysis. Geo \ Multisite clustering solutions were looked at with relevant Windows quorum models. Target HLD DR architecture documentation was delivered for the relevant services and a Final DR Design Solution agreed upon through Workshops with the customer and all technology specialists (VMware, SAN, Networking etc). My focus in the project was predominantly Windows but I also had heavy involvement in other relevant layers and technologies (VMware, EMC etc). This was a process driven environment adhering to relevant TOGAF best practices.
March 2012 – October 2012
Position: WINTEL Consultant
Company: European Aviation Safety Agency (Germany)
(European Union Agency)
EASA is an EU Agency focused on Aviation Safety within Europe, it has a number of important facets such as Airworthiness Directives, Flight Standards – Rulemaking & Technical Publications.
I worked for EASA as a WINTEL Engineer on a number of Infrastructure projects with SAN, Virtualisation, Network, Cloud (AWS) & Management technologies. The current high level focus of these projects is implementation of monitoring and change systems with emphasis on process adherence utilising SCCM and SCOM. There was a requirement to liase with the Business Process Managers for SLA & Process definition & adherence for new Service Manager and Orchestrator implementations. Duties involved technical configuration \ definition of relevant systems, reporting, design & architecture, project planning and WINTEL resource management. A dynamic, expanding role that covers a breadth of technologies & duties including but not limited to: WINTEL Solutions Design, Implementation of AWS infrastructure (S3, EC2, EBS, Cloudwatch etc), VMWare Products, Hyper-V & SCVMM, AD (Windows Server Infrastructure), Scripting, Security Considerations, Project Management.
July 2011 – December 2011 –
During this period I was travelling and learning Spanish.
February 2011 – July 2011
Position: WINTEL Consultant (Contract) Company: HSBC (Canary Wharf – London)
Having worked at HSBC Global Head Office in Canary Wharf within the Global Markets & Banking sector (GB&M), I was tasked with processing multiple projects to deploy the infrastructure for varied financial service applications which are critical to the banks investment banking sector. My role involved technical consultancy with the implementation and Technical Account Managers to ensure delivery. Core technologies are –
• Proprietary banking \ financial applications
• Windows 2008 Active Directory Infrastructure
• MS SQL Server 2008 Clustering
• HA (High Availability), Network Load Balancing (NLB) Clustering on Windows 2008 Server.
• EMC Symmetrix and Navisphere SAN Infrastructure ranging from CX to DMX (SRDF, FAST etc)
• Veritas Volume Manager
• MS SCCM & SCOM 2007 R2
• VMWare vSphere 4 Infrastructure and MS Hyper-V
Involved in the full project life cycle ranging from definition of TOR (Terms of Reference) and RDG (Requirement Gathering Document), to final production handover. Initiation and completion of relevant OAT (Operation and Acceptance Testing) procedures, with great emphasis on quality and delivery. There is a large amount of technical project management involved along with relevant documentation creation and solutions design.
April 2010 – December 2010
Position: WINTEL System Engineer (Contract)
Company: ING (Brussels)
Whilst working at the ING Belgium Head Office in Brussels, the deployment of the banks new secure network has created the requirement for new Infrastructure Technologies to be utilised & deployed. Management was a large part of my role coupled with technical consultancy. Working with multiple departments, mainly Operations and Risk Mitigation, I worked primarily with the technologies listed below –
• SCCM & SCOM 2007 R2
• MOSS (MS Office Sharepoint Server) Farm Infrastructure
• Tripwire Enterprise 7.x (used for SOX and CBFA compliance)
• VMWare 3.5 Infrastructure and MS Hyper-V
• Active Directory 2003 & 2008, MS Server 2008, MS SQL 2008 (Clustering)
• EPO 4.5 SP1(Corporate Anti-Virus solution)
• HP SIM 6.0 \ Version Control \ HP SUM (Corporate Proliant Hardware monitoring & Proliant Life Cycle Management)
• Shavlik NetChk 7.x (Non MS patching and SOX \ CBFA compliance)
Responsible for deployment of Management Tools and other relevant infrastructure, involvement in determining eligibility within the secure infrastructure and adherence to Operational & Security Guidelines (OSG). Architecting Solutions, input into Target Architecture, creating appropriate documentation such as DLD’s (Detailed Level Design’s) and input into SA’s. Conforming to DTAP (Design, Test, Acceptance, Production) processes along with ITIL and DRP (Disaster Recovery Procedure) compliance frameworks. Creation and utilisation of Proof Of Concept (POC) environments for all solutions. Input into the standards definitions of the new infrastructure, determining relevant application stack configuration for WINTEL server systems, hardware specifications and network connectivity specifications. Processing requests for relevant external connections through firewalls in adherence to security requirements. Ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability requirements are met and relevant SLA \ RTO \ RPO levels. Input and completion of Risk Assessment and BIA (Business Impact Assessment) documentation in alignment with BCP.
January 2010 – April 2010
Position: Infrastructure Administrator (Contract)
Company: Evans Cycles
Evans Cycles is a well established retail outlet specializing in cycles. My main tasks are:
• Auditing of current infrastructure to review and consult on business improvement
• ESX 4i Testing and administration of ESX 3.5 Infrastructure
• Management of MS Hyper-V environment using SCVMM
• Server Administration with IBM Hardware and Windows Infrastructure
• Instigation of new CMDB and Change Management within IT Operations
• Support and installation of MS Dynamics NAV infrastructure including K3 Callcentre
January 2009 – January 2010
During this time I was travelling, freelancing as a Windows Infrastructure Specialist and working on personal investments.
July 2008 – December 2008
Position: Senior Operations Consultant (Contract)
Company: GfK NOP (London)
I worked in a Systems Consultant and Project Management capacity for GfK NOP (Growth from Knowledge National Opinion Poll). An ex-government international market research company.
Within my role at GFK I primarily managed the “Corporate Application Migration” project which entailed the migration of external systems to the internal LAN redundant (clustered) infrastructure in order to adhere to the new BCP policy. This involved project planning of the migration, including information gathering and analysis, reporting and resource management (MS Project). Hands on approach is also made, technologies involved are NetApp FAS Filer systems \ Data ONTAP, VMWare, MS SQL Clusters and IIS (4.0,5.0,6.0), .NET component installation and configuration principally within a WINTEL environment. Creation of design specification and infrastructure standardisation for the data centre technologies was performed with emphasis on redundancy and future capacity requirements. Cost implications for hardware & software including licensing, post-installation support & consultancy were investigated & reported to the IT Director.
Core systems, infrastructure and application technologies involved were:
-VMWare ESX 3.5
-Active Directory (GPO’s, Domain-Forest build and admin, Replication, DC builds)
-SQL 7.0\2000\2005
-Exchange Server 2007
-NetApp SAN Infrastructure
-Proprietary Market Research web based applications
October 2006 – May 2008
Position: Data Centre Infrastructure Specialist (Contract)
Company: EDS & Xafinity Paymaster (Pensions Industry, Ex-Government)
I initially worked for EDS for 6 months who was bought in as an external service provider by Xafinity Paymaster for primarily the “Modernisation Project”. The EDS project work completed after 6 months and I subsequently contracted direct to Xafinity Paymaster to consult on further Data Centre solution implementations.
Xafinity Paymaster provides pensions and annuities financial processing and banking services for over 1,100 public sector customers including Government Departments, Health Authorities, NHS and Primary Care Trusts and various non-departmental Public Bodies and Trading Funds. It’s pensions payroll services process payments totalling more then £7 billion. Core Infrastructure consists of 450 servers with 5 remote offices.
Project work:
As part of the IDA (Infrastructure Design Authority) I have team involvement in leading Road-Map and Standards definitions.
With Solution Implementations I looked towards minimising future support and administration tasks by establishing standardised environments within Xafinity. I took the approach of recognising and considering TCO of any systems implemented. Consolidation of system’s from Storage through to Applications is acknowledged whilst minimising duplication of Infrastructure. Full costing & reporting of hardware & software solutions was also performed along with licensing, consultancy & post-installation administration \ support costs.
Xafinity had a GSI accredited environment, relevant Penetration Testing \ Server-Environment hardening and security requirements are adhered to. Xafinity Paymaster is an ex-government based organisation and as such the ITIL Framework was fully adhered to as was ISO 9000 standards. Structured Change Requests procedures were implemented and Business Process documents utilised such as RFP and RFI.
Off Shoring Project – Off-Shoring of Pensions and Annuities administration tasks and jobs was actioned with the use of HCL in Chennai (India). Infrastructure connectivity from Chennai into the UK was performed with direct liaison to HCL technical consultants, enabling access to relevant applications and infrastructure for the appropriate “Pensions” & “Annuities” applications to function. The scope of this project was broad and catered for business requirements for the functional needs of HCL off-shoring staff who were to perform the migrated job roles. WINTEL infrastructure connectivity and information \ data replication into Chennai was catered for also. Off-Shoring of technical system’s and services to HCL was performed whilst maintaining support and maintenance standards as well as adhering to security requirements.
Core tasks: Design and architecting of Windows Environment to provision for off-shoring infrastructure \ Build & Configuration of virtualized windows infrastructure to host applications \ communication to technical off shore 3rd parties to instigate technical environment–troubleshoot as required.
Modernisation and Integration Project – Xafinity Paymaster bought in EDS to perform the modernisation Project on which I was consulting. This project entailed the modernization of old legacy system’s and services in a structure manner, core tasks were: Decommissioning of legacy system’s \ definition of system’s eligibility for P2V actions \ migration of legacy system’s onto virtualized – modern physical system’s \ staggered system’s disconnect \ NT4 – AD domain migration within a multiple forest infrastructure. Creation of new AD domain infrastructure. Creation of new standardized Windows 2003 OS and integration into existing Infrastructure. Scripted administration of server’s including the use of unattended installation files, Sysprep, UDF, WSF, DOS based script’s, Batch Files, HTA. Project planning and reporting to Management on a weekly basis was performed.
Remedy Application Infrastructure Project – Definition and provision of all IT infrastructure (including hardware) for the Remedy Suite of applications used. Adherence to business DR and clustering requirements for the Remedy Application. Integration and configuration of back-end databases (MS SQL), mail configurations such as POP\SMTP and IIS web services for Remedy. Deployment of Remedy Action Request on client systems. Liasing with BMC for support and outage issues, addressing and resolving issues as required.
Back-Up Standardisation Project – Having a requirement to implement an enterprise wide back-up infrastructure due to greater storage and archiving demands from the business I was involved in evaluating numerous back-up technologies looking for a relevant solution to deliver. Evaluations showed a large amount of daily resource was being utilised to remove tape drives from tape libraries and a new consolidated solution was required to free resource. Currently I specifying and deploying our preferred Asigra Televault and MS DPM (Data Protection Manager) solution. Solution had to adhere to a mixed OS environment and back-up over IP to make it protocol\OS independent.
AD and Network Rationalisation – Recent acquisitions of a number of companies has left a multiple AD forest and mixed IP ranges across the network. Presently involved in flattening the IP structure and consolidating AD domains and forests.
Data Centre Consolidation & Migration Project – Migration of services from multiple data centre’s and smaller computer room’s to central locations, core tasks: Documentation of infrastructure to instigate consolidation of computer room’s into central data centre \ migration of services to central data centre \ planning for duplication of system’s for DR data centre \ amalgamation data centres which had come about from acquisitions.
Pensions Software – Compendia and Penserve application infrastructure administration, development, design and support.
Evaluations – Hands on evaluations of SCOM \ SCCM \ SCCP and Server 2008 (including Core installations and command line configuration).
BAU tasks:
• Server support primarily Windows 2003 (R2) within a Datacentre environment.
• Building servers and racks, iLO configurations, cabling HP Hardware (DL Proliant systems \ c7000 Blade system’s).
• Administration of Exchange 2003 e-mail system, SMTP and POP configurations.
• Documenting network layout, server builds and configurations (use of Visio).
• Business Objects installation and administration for Crystal Reports Server XI R2, Central Management Console.
• Managing windows networking environment with tasks ranging from Domain Controller creation \ build to Service Pack Installations.
• Administering MS Virtual Server, VMWare (ESX 3.02/GSX), Backup Exec, Storage Devices. SAN/NAS (AX150’s, CX 300-700, SANCopy, Navisphere, Powerpath, Mirror View), ODBC, SQL Server 2005, Symantec Anti-Virus, BES v4.
• Providing 3rd line support within a Payroll, Pensions and Annuities environment.
July 2005 – Sept 2006
Position: IOC Systems Administrator (Permanent)
Company: BAA plc
September 2002 – June 2005
Position: Technical Engineer (Permanent)
Company: Amadeus Marketing UK
January 2001 – July 2002
Position: IT Support Analyst (Contract)
Company: BT Wholesale Markets
December 2000 – January 2001
Position: 3rd Line Support (Contract)
Company: British Airways
October 2000 – December 2000
Position: 2nd Line Desktop & LAN Support (Contract)
Company: Tokyo Electron Ltd
October 1997 – July 2000
Position: Technical Support Advisor (Permanent)
Company: Opus Technology Ltd.
