Joshua Lukes Email & Phone Number

My career in IT started at age 10 when I broke my fathers computer that I wasn't supposed to be using in the first place and had to fix it quickly and quietly. I continued my interest in computers first by exploring programming languages and later by attending Georgia Institute of Technology for Computer Science. Its was at Georgia Tech that I discovered I had more of an affinity for the hardware, operating systems and software that supported the applications my fellow students would go on to write rather than writing the applications myself.I entered the job market as a Technical Support Technician at a small ISP in upstate NY and was quickly promoted to Technical Support Manager after outperforming my contemporaries. I credit this promotion to my ability to solve problems on the fly, think analytically, and deconstruct a scenario to identify root cause quickly. Unfortunately the viability of small ISPs was short-lived with giants like AOL and EarthLink dominating the market. Working at an ISP however prepared me for my next job which was building my very first data center in 1998 to be used as a media archive for large content providers.This first data center build whetted my appetite for similar projects at my next four jobs and I successfully evolved my project management, IT service management, and business process improvement skills with each iteration. Along the way I learned to build and inspire teams of technicians, resolve conflict and control costs. I taught myself how to administer Windows and Linux operating systems and actively researched best practices for security and operating system hardening.My latest effort has scaled-up from my initial data center build. It started with first HP BladeSystem then IBM BladeCenters before settling on Cisco UCS blades running VMware vSphere. Later I led the migration of over 7000 virtual machines to Nutanix AHV on hyper-converged infrastructure to reduce costs and complexity. This effort set the stage for my latest interest which is to continue the effort of simplifying data centers, make them more efficient and reduce their impact on our environment. Technology has always fascinated me and I embrace the change it inevitably brings to any organization. If your organization is in need of a change agent, please contact me here on LinkedIn and I'd be happy to discuss any opportunities you might have.

Listed skills include Data Center, Cloud Computing, Itil, Vmware, and 22 others.