2012 – Present Veritas Reading,Principle Hardware Engineer – Appliance Engineering CFTResponsible to managing technical engineering appliance escalation from support in the EMEA timezone. I report into Mountain View, California and I am based in Green Park, Reading to help the group deliver a global escalation support. I have developed the processes for the team use to deliver escalation support using an Agile framework. I also have a responsibility to understand customer issue, trend faults and feed this back into product development as part of continual product improvement.Netbackup Advance Technical Support Engineer - ESSPart of the global support organisation working with Symantec customers to support the installed base. Give customers guidance on installation, upgrade performance issues or just assist them with their general backup environments. Working with Backline and Engineering to improve product supportability. I have expertise across the whole of the Symantec Netbackup product range, the core product, Deduplication technology such as PureDisk and MSDP and specialising in the Symantec’s hardware Appliances.I am also a support feature champion/lead for file system workloads.

Infrastructure architecture and Tier 3 support developing the future infrastructure strategy throughout Europe and Africa and Central Asia. DCs are based in the UK with an estate built around IBM Power and HP Proliant servers and EMC storage (Clariion CX960, DMX and VMAX) with NetApp storage at the remote assets. BG Groups policy is to virtualise servers where possible using VMWare ESXi. Working with BG outsourcing partner to improve levels of support and delivery against SLA’s. Pickup up support issues they were unable to resolve and feeding back resolutions back to help improve service.As part of Tier 3 support I carried out several technical activities such as server performance analysis (using tools such as the sysinternals toolset and PAL reports for windows) Powershell scripting for automating information gathering and system administration.I managed several internal infrastructure projects including: Email Archiving using Symantec Enterprise Vault 10 built a POC in BG Groups Lab environment. Designed and implemented a new backup solution for VMWare ESX VM backups using PHD Virtual. As part of the solution I implemented a third tier storage solution to complement the existing Tier 1 and 2 storage platforms. Upgraded VMWare ESX 4.0 to ESXi 5.0 including platform upgrade running over 1000+ VM. I reviewed and advised on infrastructure design for new application projects to ensure they fit into the estate. Once the blue prints are signed of I would build and deliver the infrastructure to project timescales. This would involve building and configuring both physical and virtual servers adding them to the BG AD Domain if appropriate.  Support the IBM Power 6 570 server hosting the SAP (ERP, Portal and BW) Landscape and liaise with the external support vendor managing the SAP Basis function. The environment used both LPAR and WPARs running AIX.

As a senior manager with Harrods my key responsibility was the design and support of Harrods SAP ERP infrastructure, SAN/NAS environment and server virtualisation. I designed and built up a server virtualisation infrastructure based around VMWare ESX 3.5 and 4.0 hosts running over 100 VM’s across two sites. Using Visioncore VRanger for backups and VReplicator for site replication. I managed P2V conversions. Upgraded Harrods SAN and NAS Architecture twice over the 7 years the latest being EMC CX4-480 arrays at the store and our distribution centre supporting around 120TB and a Cisco fabric (9216i and 9134). Replication between sites utilised EMC Recoverpoint and Mirrorview and I had written several scripts to automate these processes. Unstructured data is implemented on an EMC NAS using twin NS52G servers. Snapshots are used to manage backups and I used analyser to manage the performance of the arrays. I managed the basis team. We performed a SAP R/3 4.6C to ECC6.0 system landscape upgrade, introduced a SAP BW environment with a BIA accelerator and several TREX servers. The environment had over 1000 users, the ECC DB is over 2TB. We managed transports, backups and performance trouble shooting. We used HP Data Protector 6.1 to manage backups and I was responsible for Bridge support and overnight operations. Deployed CA NSM as a companywide tool to monitor the sever estate along with CA AutoSys for job scheduling.My key business drivers were:• Maintain data security. • Maintain system performance.• Problem resolution. • I negotiated several external support contracts to enhance the support of our internal team. • Capacity planning.• Cost analysis, considering ROI and TCO and tracking several support budgets.

• Managed the implementation of new UNIX severs within the 186k domain.• 24X7 Unix administration of Sun Enterprise servers (Solaris 2.6, 7 and 8) and HP L and R Class (HP-UX 11.00) in the 186k domain.• Change Control Manager role for 186K with responsibility for managing and authorising change across the company.• Project managing the move of 186k’s externally hosted internet site to be locally hosted from within186k on a SUN E450 running Solaris 8.• Helped define the internal company SLA’s and as a member of the IT support team help manage the delivery of these SLA’s on a day to day basis. • Installed and configured Veritas Netbackup DataCenter 3.4 to backup the Unix systems including SAP R/3 integration. • Implemented BMC Patrol to manage the UNIX environment including the SAP Optisys option.• Senior Basis administrator supporting 186k’s SAP R/3 4.6B system 24x7. Responsible for security, transports, configuration and performance. 186k landscape consisted of a standard three system landscape and a single stand alone test system, total size of about 150GB and 350 configured users. • Prepared and tested a technical upgrade of the SAP R/3 system from 4.6B to 4.6C.• Designed, configured and built three Unix Veritas HA Clusters, two Solaris one using twin E3500 (solaris7) and the second using twin E280 (Solaris 8) both with dual A5000 disk arrays for storage and one HP-UX with twin L-Class servers with FC60 storage (HPUX 11.00).• Installed an Oracle 8.1.7 database for a Comshare finance application and subsequently performed all the required DBA functions for the system.

• Managed a team of six consultants across the UK with complete responsibility for their career and personal development this included performance reviews, setting salaries, devise training and development plans and determining appropriate grades.• Designed and implemented various 2 to 5 node HP MC/ServiceGuard HA Clusters at many blue chip companies, clients such as Vodafone. Clusters based around the HP product range and including A-class to V-Class servers and used various disk subsystems such as XP256 Storage Arrays, EMC, AutoRaid and FC-60 disk arrays. • Developed a low cost HA platform using HP’s MC/Serviceguard and Legato Backup software to form a platform to support collection engines for a pre-paid phone network solution based around an Informix database being sold by a newly formed off-shoot company of Orange. The platform was designed to operate in a light out, unmanned locations with minimal maintenance, zero down time and to have minimal performance hits during backup.• For DLJ I designed and project managed the implementation of a 2 node Veritas Campus cluster with two XP256 Storage Arrays as the disk subsystem with each node separated over 10Km ESCON link.• Implemented several backup solutions (HP OmniBack and Veritas Netbackup) at many clients including SAP integration at RNLI, 186k Ltd, Oracle Financials at New Zealand Milk Board and several other Oracle and Informix integration.• Managed a team of 8 UNIX administrators supporting the UNIX server environment for a major City trading bank.• Worked for 3 months as part of HP’s ERP consultancy division specialising in planning and implementing SAP R/3.• I was a member of the working party responsible for defining and implementing the company’s salary and grading structure.