James Blankenship Email & Phone Number

Customer Solution Center

United States & Global Accounts

Global Technology Office Systems Engineer. I leveraged my personal knowledge and over 25 years of experience to provide guidance, design and support to internal DELL EMC as well as our Global Enterprise and Commercial customers. Personal hands on experience building next generation data centers and improving operational efficiency of existing operations across all layers of the IO Stack (Apps, DBs, OSs, Fabrics/Networks, Storage, Disaster & Isolated Recovery). All of this taking into account the Business needs to be flexible, timely, always online and come in above performance expectations.

United States & Global Accounts

EMC PROVEN: EMCISA, EMCPA, EMCCIS, EMCSA, EMCSAe, EMCCA, EMCCAeLead & Overlay for Open Systems, Mainframe & Converged/Hyper-converged, backup, replication and recovery presales activities for Florida Enterprise & Global Accounts. I Deliver the vision and strategy as well as design for the Private & Hybrid Cloud Architectures across all domains of IT: Compute, Network, Storage, Virtualization, Automation, Self-Service, load-balancing and reporting. This leading role allows me to assist customers in accelerating their IT transformation as well as protect them from the threats that exist today: Hacktivist, Natural Disasters, Auditing, Regulatory changes, Human ErrorI use my personal experience and knowledge of technology, products, processes, and skills to assess and educate customers and EMC Account Teams on the value of Information Infrastructure and Software. I then utilize in-depth knowledge of clients' technical priorities, challenges and initiatives to assist customers and EMC Account Teams to develop and implement technology solutions that meet customers' needs while positioning them for the future.As a longtime Engineer and Architect for Mid-market, Enterprise and Global accounts I have experience in many verticals: Financials, Healthcare, Aerospace, Energy, Retail & Apparel, Food & Beverage, Hospitality, Federal, Military, Logistics and Transportation (Rail & Aviation). The solutions that I have designed and implemented span Open Systems, Mainframe (IBM & Unisys), virtualization, Converged, Hyper-converged, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, application modernization and IT transformation to Self-Service.

EMC PROVEN: EMCISA, EMCPA, EMCCIS, EMCSA, EMCSAe, EMCCA Worked with XtremIO development & engineering to test the limitations under IO Load. Personally designed heavy IO workloads that highlighted the XtremIO strengths and weaknesses. Reported to XtremIO (Isreal) with the IO workload design as well as the internal coding , design, & feature set responsible for the issues. Provide recommendations for corrective actions either in the IO workflow or storage design. Redefined the SALES strategy for XtremIO. I developed a strategy for ETC & XtremIO where application workloads and IO can be designed and targeted for maximum throughput.Worked with engineering to test & develop maximum workload benchmarks for EMC and its customers using XtremSF cards. Personally designed, tested, & validated a customer benchmark that surpassed both EMC & Virident’s published MAXIMUM IO load potential by over 40%. This workload required Cisco UCS Bios tuning, Linux VM OS tuning, optimal filesystem design & card format and partitioning. EMC and Virident development teams took the environment and duplicated it within their engineering and development labs. Customer was used as the primary example in the GA press release and video debut.Experience with implementation and sizing of VMAX CE both internally & externally. Provided floor coverage for sales & engineering during EMC World 2013. This led to multiple sales leads within the US & Australia. Co-authored & built the VMAX CE Partner Training for VMAX Channel Partner Strategy. This includes the accreditation exam. Assisted VMAX Cloud Edition Product Management & VMAX CE development teams with Recoverpoint Design & Implementation best practices for Local & Remote replication. Components include Disk group labeling, FA – RP layout, Journal band sizing and documentation for VMAX CE with RP. Experience implementing ViPR within the ETC Lab. Hands on Lab assistance with installation & configuration support of ViPR at EMC World 2013.

Global

Provide consultative design and implementation support in pre-sales, implementation, post-sales, and proof-of-concepts for EMC's external customers and EMC internal IT departments. Expanding operational capabilities and correcting the growth over time syndrome (sins-of-the-past) that comes with growing from pre-SMB up to the largest of Enterprise footprints.

Savannah, Georgia Area

Personally stabilized Nine Line Apparel's operations (President St. Savannah, GA) across multiple buildings as well as their Online Marketplace during early adoption of the company's brand and market presence. Renegotiated all contracts impacting business services: Hardware, Software, Telecom for the existing operations as well as for the next evolution of Nine Line Apparel.I designed and built their next generation manufacturing facility with the next-level Information Technology platforms: IP Network, IP Phones, Storage, Video Security, End User Compute, NAS and internal ERP (SAP Hana). During this design and build, I personally trained and built out the Teams for ERP (SAP Hana) support and internal application development, shipping and receiving, as well as growing the previous online marketplace to multiple online platforms (Amazon, and position to move to well defined Business Solutions methodologies. We revamped the entire Technology Stack internally and externally leading to the tremendous success of the internal call center, art department, video and marketing as well as HR and Business Systems.Developed all new B2B, B2C, Production, Inventory and Back Office hardware, applications, processes and procedures. The scale and scope of the concurrent projects and growth of the business were tremendous and they still capitalize on the performance and headroom created during this transformation.

Bluffton, South Carolina

Bluffton, South Carolina, United States

Took over a failing IT implementation & turned it into a showcase example for yet to be created VCE. My personal design & configuration became the template for VCE still uses today. Built trained a 3 person team that reconfigured all operational servers & storage across 2 data-centers and 3 call centers. Online without downtime. I developed the Enterprise NAS, CIFS (10gb FCoE), & SAN that quickly ingested 200% business growth & expanded into Hybrid Cloud based solutions like ATMOS & Load balanced customer facing APPs & DBs across datacenters. Lead a limited team of internal engineers to completely redesign & implement a virtual application & database life cycle. This allowed the developers & database admins to develop, test, & go to production within two days. This cycle pace was achieved with zero downtime & is the quickest of any technology company still today. Fully documented the entire life cycle to allow for new employees to quickly ramp up & support future operations. Created a one-of-a-kind "Mobile Command Center" to allow the IT support staff & Executive Leadership to quickly move operations should a natural disaster occur. This Command Center is the actual Operations Center used daily & is able to pickup & move to any location within hours without loss of capability or connectivity. Lead the same team of internal engineers & Vendors to Design & implemented Cisco Unified Communications (displacing AVAYA), Cisco Telepresence, EMC GreenPlum, EMC DataDomain, EMC VPLEX, & VMware's full suite of data-center productivity applications & application management software tools. Completely retooled the IT support staff, development teams, QA teams as well as the IT Leadership from SMB minded capabilities & operations to full scale Global Enterprise capabilities & multi-site production status. Fully redundant local and fully replicated status that could recover in less than 15 minutes or once a swap is declared.

Architected, designed, and implemented technology refreshes for the fastest growing EMC and Cisco Systems Customers within the Health Care space. Bringing site to site replication, local disaster recovery, improved production performance, and increased Family – Work Balance to their employees through increased environment stability and reduced run times for production applications. Solutions included DMX, VMAX, UCS, Nexus, ATMOS, DataDomain, EDL, Celerra G-8, SRDF/A, Clarrion Site Replication, CLONE, SNAP, Celerra Replication, Oracle redesigns, TSM, redesigns, Lotus Notes redesigns, Replication Manager, and SQL Server redesigns. Companies included Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), AvMed Health Plans, University of Miami Hospital, CareCore National, Meditech, and Regions Healthcare. Each company, having outgrown their storage, compute, and employee base required complete datacenter refreshes while maintaining their current production operations, bringing site to site replication, training their workforce to utilize and manage the new best in breed technology, 8gb Fibre Channel, iSCSI, 10gb FCoE, and end to end virtualization with VBLOCK design (virtual Compute, Network, Storage).

Multiple

Psychological Operations, Intelligence Analyst, Systems Engineer

Perform Innovative Technologies testing and Proof of Concepts for Enterprise and Corporate Investment Banking, Enterprise SAN – Server – Application Capacity & Performance, Enterprise SAN & Server Design. Have been evaluating new technologies like Solid State Disks, Virtual Operating Systems, Server and Storage decoupling, Grid Computing and Grid Storage, and InfiniBand (Mellanox) Technologies for both Wachovia Enterprise but also the Corporate Investment Banking organization. I have personally designed the Server and Storage model for the AG Edwards and Wachovia Securities, Inc. merger and consolidation now underway. I have identified and put into action a $6 million a year in cost savings for Wachovia by decreasing their demand on Tape backups and retention. I have begun action model to decrease the storage (data footprint) for Wachovia’s Data Warehouse environment that currently consumes 138 TB @ $9.00 per Gigabyte to a footprint of 72 TB @ $6.50 per Gigabyte. After final conversion and cost analysis is complete more large scale data environments will move to this model. Have been the sole Wachovia Performance Engineer for Unix, Windows, AS400, and Storage for Wachovia since joining the bank in July 2007. Currently I’m working to develop the Storage Availability Patterns for Wachovia Bank to ensure maximum datacenter availability. I’m working on a “Consolidated IO” initiative to decrease infrastructure, cost, and maintenance at the same time increasing the IO bandwidth for IP, Storage Fibre, and non-IP network connectivity. Performing scalability design and testing work with outside companies (EMC, Fortuitous, IBM, NetApp, NexSan, 3par, Mellanox, and Hitachi)

Provide performance assessments of Server and Storage environments. These end-to-end assessments are used to correct growth, implementation, and non storage related problems in existing SAN environments.large scale consolidations and initial SAN implementations. Provides technical business consultative leadership during the pre-sales/post-sales cycle. Develop strategies, policies and best practices. Responsible for achieving the EMC Bar of Excellence as the highest level of Customer Satisfaction for every customer. Design, develope technical content defined in the statement of work. Design the EMC solution, support the installation, customization, and integration. Prepares technical architectural/implementation design documents. Expert in the pre-sales qualification responsible for the delivery of the technical architectural design, strategies and plans delivered in the engagement. Responsible for the creation of proposals that address current and evolving client requirements.

Provide both Level 1 and Level 2 pre & post sales support on a majority of EMC software products and provide customer host, SAN, and Storage performance tunning. Includes pre-site inspection, initial installation, implementation, diagnostics, break-fix, debugging and complete environment performance analysis. Subject Matter Expert (SME) for EMC Global Services (Research Triangle Park (RTP), NC). Specializing in Problem, Performance, and Trend Analysis. Responsible for Developing EMC’s internal and customer instructor led & web based classes for performance based software products (DbTuner, Workload Analyzer, Power Path, & Volume Logix), version 4.2 and higher. Developed the EMC ECC O/E 5.0 Workload Analyzer Training Course now taught by EMC. Provided liaison support for EMC’s Sales, Professional Services, and Regional Software Support Specialists (RSSS) on design, installation, and problem/performance related issues. Managed and operated EMC’s Beta Test Center (RTP, NC).

SAN administrator and Server/Storage Capacity Planner.

Multiple

Signals Intelligence Analyst and Spanish Linguist

FSSS for XVIII ABN CORPS ACE, G2, 1st BCD, 470th MI Bn, 297th CMISE, & 7th SFG. Resp: Systems Analyst, Systems Admin, Server Config Manager, Network Config Manager. Systems: ASAS-AS, ASAS-SS, ASAS-RWS, Warrior, WLNB, CCS, CSP, DTSS, IMETS. Platforms: IBM PC, laptops (Unix, Linux, and Windows), DEC VAX3800, DEC Alpha RISC, SunSPARC-Ultra, HP9000, 380, 382. Support maintain 12 separate VMS, Linux, Windows, UNIX client/server enclaves across USPanama,Kuwait, Saudi Arabia via remote & onsite admin. Maintain gateways, routers, mail servers, print servers, sub-networks associated w/ the enclaves. Troubleshoot correct network issues ranging from data encryption, firewalls, LAN/WAN hardware issues, to basic OS params. Support exercise, real world & contingency OPS. Configured garrison & deployment networks via GISA & TROJAN JWICS/SIPRNET networks. Installed, maintained, updated 8 UNIX/VMS (NCSA MOSAIC, APACHE) HTTP servers, homepages for 5 military Units at Ft. Bragg, NC & abroad.