While still maintaining customer satisfaction as a top priority, I now work directly with customers in order to execute an architected IT solution. There are times when reviewing the solution, with the customer, I will make recommendations that will best serve their business needs. Some of the recommendations would include the differences between creating a new Active Directory environment vs. extending their existing one. Other discussions could include deploying an active/passive, active/active and Always-on cluster for Windows and SQL. In order to ensure a build is deployed exactly as the customer requested, I coordinate with other functional Rackspace teams in emails, calls, and our ticketing system. Throughout the process, I continue to hone my skills by working with Active Directory and SQL. I routinely build numerous environments from single domain controllers, to regional domain models. This would often involve extending the customers domain from their on-site premise into Rackspace or extending across Rackspace Data Centers. Additionally, I routinely update documentation processes and procedures to ensure best practices are met.

Responsible for providing support to customers and their environments. This ranges from assisting with issues within the customer portal to ensuring optimal uptime of high availability technologies. On a daily basis, I work with Windows Server 2008 & 2012 and support technologies such as hardware, AD, DNS, IIS, RDS, PowerShell, and SQL. In addition to technical support, I work with our customers to create network diagrams of their environment, giving them a visual representation. During my time as a night Racker, I was an escalation point for other technicians on difficult issues, as well as a point of contact should our manager not be available. In my time as a night shift, and now day shift, worker I am a training point for new technicians on shift where I provide shift processes, troubleshooting techniques, and explanations on how to resolve technical issues.

Front-line Racker that typically had the first interaction with our customers. I would work with them to determine what their needs were, and would get them to the appropriate department for further assistance. While assisting our customers, I would also identify key issues/tickets within our queue and allocate resources to resolve them in a timely manner. Support Specialists were often referred to as the queue quarterbacks, because we were constantly communicating with everyone, gave direction of the workload, and kept the ticket queue in a manageable size.I continued to work in this role until my promotion to a Windows System Administrator.