Andy Thomas Email & Phone Number

Greater Chicago Area

I am a pre-sales & post-sales engineer helping customers design and implement the components of a virtualized IT infrastructure

Greater Chicago Area

My position at 411 Solutions is a dual function role with two main responsibilities. I architect, implement, and manage the data center where 411’s business continuity customers are hosted and co-located. I also provide technical pre-sales support to the sales reps selling business continuity solutions and IT infrastructure solutions.Some of the initiatives I have completed in this position are:• Replaced a legacy infrastructure used to host customers running x86 workloads. The new infrastructure more than doubled the compute power, improved network bandwidth by more than 10x, and quadrupled the storage performance & capacity all while reducing software licensing and monthly hardware costs.• Introduced virtualization into the IBM Power Systems infrastructure used to host IBM i (AS/400) customers. The new IBM Power Systems infrastructure more than doubled the compute and storage capacity while greatly reducing the operating and capital expense consumed by the previous Power Systems infrastructure.• Enhanced the monitoring, alerting, and analysis of the infrastructure with the implementation of new monitoring and reporting systems.• Introduced a tiered storage model for hosted customers and worked with the sales leadership to develop new pricing structures.• Redesigned the legacy SAN infrastructure which was incorrectly designed and out of date.• Rearchitected the email system (Lotus Domino) to be redundant and fault tolerant, as well as adding new features for the user base.• Redesigned and implemented a new redundant, meshed 10Gb data center network which improved network bandwidth and fault tolerance.

Greater Chicago Area

Technical pre-sales role architecting and demonstrating Softchoice’s solution portfolio to new and existing customer base, as well as supporting various sales and professional services teamsPrimary responsibility was designing, building, managing, and demonstrating solutions to customers in the Softchoice demonstration data centers. These demonstration data centers ware used to showcase vendor hardware & software as well as overall technology solutions not necessarily focused on one specific vendor solution. Through this demo center I managed approximately $500k of hardware configured to showcase solutions such as server virtualization, desktop virtualization, unified & consolidated storage, storage management and recovery, server management, converged networking, etc. During these demonstrations and pre-sales opportunities I worked with and advised the pre-sales solution architect teams on overall solution design as well as specific product functionality. In addition to my pre-sales activities I also provided technical support and advice for the professional services consultants in the field who were implementing the solutions and providing post-sales support.

Greater Chicago Area

Responsible for providing pre-sales, implementation, and post-sales technical support for ACP Enterprise Solutions Group customers and sales team. Designed and implemented IBM AIX high availability clusters, IBM pSeries virtualized platforms, and IBM mid-range storage subsystems and SAN networks.

Greater Chicago Area

Responsible for providing pre-sales, implementation, and post-sales technical support for datacenter infrastructure and storage solutions. Support sales staff with technical solution design and recommendations. Support end customer before, during, and after consulting engagements. Obtain technical certifications required to maintain vendor partnerships. Build and improve solutions portfolio

Greater Chicago Area

Responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting customized IT solutions such as Storage Area Networks (SAN), enterprise backup/restore solutions (TSM), UNIX high availability clusters (HACMP), and UNIX servers. Responsibilities also call for providing pre and post-sales technical support to sales staff and customers.