Gary Ford Email & Phone Number

Wakefield, England, United Kingdom

Technical delivery manager for a VMware+Citrix VDI migration project.

Wakefield, England, United Kingdom

Bradford, United Kingdom

• Implemented and evaluated a wide range of technologies, including VMware vCloud Air, VMwareVsan, VMware vRealize Ops, VMware vCloud Director, and Xendesktop VDI.Proactively function as a technical lead and accomplish.
• Architected, implemented, and migrated the vSphere estate to version 5.1, 5.5, and 6, moreover synchronised with a highly skilled storage team to migrate from HP EVA to HP 3par storage.
• Carried out accurate cost analysis on increasing the capacity of the VMware hardware estate, which resulted in a complete refresh as opposed to scaling out the existing cluster. Achieved a significant licensing cost.
• Developed and executed a complaints system to handle customer complaints for society, and a mortgage introducers system used by third parties to sell society products.
• Expertly evaluated the current SQL virtual estate, and utilised exceptional policies to save the 300k licensing costs.

Leeds, United Kingdom

My time at C&W was spent deploying virtualisation infrastructure and virtual machines for C&W's end hosting customers.

• Reduced travelling costs and secured the business around 500k per year by designing an OCS 2007 R2 solution for the business.Created and delivered various high level designs based on best practices from VMware.
• Identified and resolved VMware related issues, designed and implemented VMware data recovery as an interim backup solution for the virtual estate, and supported management and technical staff on new technologies (Flex.
• Upgraded ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1, and deployed ESXi servers to replace the legacy hardware platforms.

• Successfully virtualised 90% of customer’s environment using PlateSpin, to increase the platforms resilience and allow removal of the legacy infrastructure.Played a key role as an active member of the technical leads.
• Supported HP, EMC and NetApp Storage Area Networks, as well as designed and deployed a Windows 2003 domain using HP Hardware and VMware ESX 3.5.
• Operated a variety of technologies, including Windows Server, VMware server, ESX 3/3.5/4, Solaris 9, Exchange server 2003/2007, Citrix Metaframe, Backup Exec, SQL, MimeSweeper, HP StorageWorks San, Microsoft.

My year at British Telecom was spent working on a shift basis covering 24x7 operations for over 2200 server based systems. It was a very challenging role due to the vast range of solutions and technologies supported. The volume of work dealt with in a twelve hour shift was phenomenal and called for extreme diligence. I also acted as deputy team leader, the.

During my two year period at HBOS I worked as part of a team responsible for the platform transformation of the entire the entire centralised and distributed estate. This was a challenging role and one that required 100% accuracy. I helped to streamline the migration using scripted processing.Emphatic member of a team responsible for the NT4 to Active.

For the period 2000 - 2004 I held many challenging roles in the UK and Jersey for companies such as RBS, EDS, Halifax Bank and TD Waterhouse. I reported directly to management and advised on system improvements, in most cases designing and implementing the proposed solutions. In addition to this I provided 3rd level support to a multitude of tier 1.

I joined the Armed forces in September 1992 and spent 3 years training to be a telecommunications Technician. After successfully completing the academic course I joined active deployment in Germany repairing communications equipment and supporting command centres. I then deployed to Bosnia and specialised in I.T supporting Windows and Novell.

B.T.E.C National Diploma, Engineering; Physics, English, Mathematics And Technology

B.T.E.C National Diploma, Engineering; Physics, English And Technology