Mark Laforest Email & Phone Number

Austin, Tx, Us

Austin, Texas, United States

Austin, Texas Area

Provides support to the College of Liberal Arts web development staff. Managing multiple RHEL/Centos 6/7 systems running in HA cluster configuration. Automated installation and configuration of systems using Ansible and internally developed CMS tools. Installed ELK stack for log management purposes. Manage iSCSI, NFS, MySQL, Postgres, WordPress, Drupal, Varnish, RBD, Atlassian, Oracle 8i, and Linux enviornments for the University.

Austin, Texas Area

NimbusMon is an open source monitoring monitoring tool designed using open source technologies focusing on providing information System Administrators need to do their jobs.

Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas Area

Manage six groups: System Architecture, Development, Managed Services, Tier 2 Call Center, Data Center Operations, and Corporate Support – Manage an organization of over 60 employees and 3 managers. Responsible for quality assurance, defining and reporting key performance indicators, defining best practices, playbooks, and mentoring employees. I am responsible for hiring decisions, performance reviews, disciplinary action, and employee training programs. Oversee technology operations for all aspects of the company. Responsible for IT department’s budget, manage vendor relationships, defining service level agreements and signing contracts. In the past two years, Renegotiated most of the company’s contracts and services, reducing operating costs by over 30%. Currently involved in developing strategies to increase sales, improve products, find new revenue chains, and improve customer relations. Responsible for corporate security and PCI compliancy. Manage the company’s business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Worked with the development team to deploy Agile Methodologies and implement SCRUM. Under my direction, the development team deployed Jira, Jenkins, staging/test environment, and Trac to enhance the development team’s productivity. Transitioned the Systems Architecture group from poor internal practices to industry best practices. Deployed PXE boot environment, OpenStack, CloudStack, PFSense, Puppet, BetterLinux, and many other tools. Deployed network DDoS defense mitigation using BGP, PBR, ACL, and network scrubbing. Improved network uptime from 98.5% to 99.95% and improved system uptime from 96.5% to 99.9%. Responsible for product and system lifecycles.Created an employee pipeline by working with the company’s recruiting and training groups. Developed advanced training program to develop employees skills. Reduced employee churn from nearly 50% to less than 3%. Work closely with the project management office (PMO) on internal and external projects.

Austin, Texas Area

The data center team provided support to a 120,000 square foot data center. The other team was responsible for supporting a development and engineering lab. I managed eight employees: One senior manager and seven senior system administrators. Provide support to over 18,000 customers located in over 20 countries. Responsible for more than 8,500 servers and 20,000 virtual machines. Maintained an average uptime of 99.995%. Responsible for supporting multiple operating systems: Windows, Linux, HPUX, AIX, Solaris and Tru64. Supported and provided input to improve Oracle’s EM Cloud product. Managed and maintained over three petabytes of storage on EMC, Network Appliance, Pillar, and Sun storage arrays. Experience with virtualization technologies such as Sun LDOMs, Xen, OVM, VMWare ESX and ESXi. Provided backup and restore services, system monitoring and system security. Maintained organizations business continuity management plans (BCMP), customer SLAs, and disaster and recovery services. Have extensive experience with database technologies: Oracle 10g, 11g, MySQL, and Postgresql. Developed a wide range of scripts and programs to reduce workload, monitor systems, and manage infrastructure.

WatchCollectors.org is a small non-profit organizaiton dedicated to horology and collecting of time pieces. I provide techical advice and help with the redesign of the web site.

Taught MCIS Graduate Courses.

Austin, Texas Area

Provide technical support for 64bit development. Installed and configured systems. Manage Storage. Developed web applications.

Provide QA testing and support for corporate products

Kunia, Hawaii

Intelligence Analyst.

Bachelor Of Science In Computer Science, Computer Science, 3.68

Activities and Societies: Alpha ChiIEEE Computer Science Degree

Mscis, Computer Information Systems

St. Edward's is a great small university.

Bscs, Computer Science

Hs Diploma, Art And English