Michael Blane Email & Phone Number

Houston, Texas, Us

Responsible for all aspects of the Information Technology department for the entire company. Ensuring network connectivity, ensuring server uptime, ensuring laptop and desktop reliability, ensuring secure off-site connectivity, and ensuring backups and disaster recovery operations were online and maintainable.- Documented processes for the IT Department so that the company could pass IT audits.- Responsible for the company IT Budget for four (4) years. Responsible for the computer hardware lifecycle including planning, purchasing, roll-out, re-use, and decommissioning of all hardware.- Self-imposed a yearly document review to ensure that all documentation was up to date and would support an ISO review or a SOX audit. Since ASL is not a publicly traded company, there was not a requirement to be SOX compliant, but since several of ASL’s customers are publicly traded companies, the customers can ask for that type of information and documentation.- Documented processes that ASL was contractually obligated to perform, when the in-house knowledge was lost due to an employee retiring.

Responsible for the ongoing support, maintenance, performance and up-time of data center facility. Escort or ensure safety compliance of customers, contract staff, vendors and carriers that require access to data center facilities.Duties- Schedule preventive maintenance for facility equipment and ensure maintenance is performed per SLA.- Manage physical access to data center facilities and racks.- Manage external support agreements and liaise with vendors.- Provide and maintain data cabling and associated documentation within the data center.- Design, monitor and control heat dissipation through the strategic placement of key infrastructure.- Responsible for working with vendors on the proper upkeep of CRAC units, diesel generator, power and UPS systems, and fire suppression systems.- Monitor power draw, ensure the proper upkeep of UPS and generators.- Design rack layouts and maintain relevant documentation.- Actively contribute to processes associated with the data center.- Manage on-call rosters and/or shift work resources as required.

Houston, Texas, Us

Responsible for all aspects of the IT Infrastructure including Desktop, Servers, mobile, messaging, web site.

Houston, Texas, Us

Responsible for all aspects of the maintenance, updates, software and hardware upgrades, documentation, and configuration of network and server infrastructure (servers, routers, switches, and firewalls) of several individual small- to medium-sized businesses, in the oil and gas, accounting, legal, medical, and service industries. The Solutions IS Service Desk is primarily responsible for Desktops and Laptops, but I am called occasionally to perform those functions as well. I am also called upon occasionally by other System Administrators when they have multiple problems and cannot be "in two places at the same time."

Houston, Texas, Us

Responsible for administration, maintenance, upgrading, and troubleshooting of the company’s Texas-based physical and virtual Windows servers, including patching, updating server software to meet departmental software upgrade timelines, and ensuring that the servers are available during production hours.

Houston, Texas, Us

Responsible for administration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of the company’s Texas-based physical and virtual Windows servers, including patching, updating server software to meet departmental software upgrade timelines, and ensuring that the servers are available during production hours. Administered the hosted email domains for three of the Sterling subsidiary companies. Provided Level 3 problem remediation working directly with the users to ensure that the problems were correctly solved. Worked as Primary Contact on the 2012 SOX Audit, interfacing with the internal and external auditors, software audit & compliance and hardware lease information projects.- Responsible for re-creating and maintaining the server backups, and ensuring that the tapes were rotated correctly. Created and instituted the first quarterly and yearly backups. Also ensured that backups were taken off-site.- Coordinated computer and peripheral purchases, and reported purchases to Accounting for proper charge backs per company or per department.- Programmed the Avaya IP Office VOIP phone system, adding users and extensions.- Created documentation for solutions to common problems where no documentation had currently existed before. This documentation proved extremely significant in the creation of the current HelpDesk as most of the common issues could be solved within the first 5 minutes of the call with repeatable and understandable steps.

Cedar Park, Tx, Us

Contracted to Germania Insurance as a Server Systems Engineer, responsible for ~200 servers (both physical and virtual). Responsible for patch management, maintenance, software upgrades, and Level 3 helpdesk support. Responsible for the Citrix XenApp environment.

Brenham, Texas, Us

Responsible for administration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of approximately 200 physical and virtual Windows servers, including patching, updating server software to meet departmental software upgrade timelines, and ensuring that the servers are available during production hours. Provide Level 3 Helpdesk problem remediation, working directly with the users to ensure that the problems were correctly solved. Work on software audit & compliance and hardware lease information projects. Begin work on the company’s Citrix XenApp re-deployment as part of their pandemic plan.

Houston, Tx, Us

Senior member of the Station Support Computer project responsible for all aspects of the International Space Station crew mission support network including researching new technologies, collaborating with developer communities to understand software requirements, automating computer processes to reduce manual intervention troubleshooting problems, and documenting requirements, processes, and products for use within the NASA community.- Designed, developed, installed and maintained the International Space Station crew support network servers. These servers are mission critical and are responsible for the astronaut mission schedules, procedures, email, and data collection.- Redesigned, programmed, documented and implemented the software update system for the International Space Station crew support network, which allows for configuration managed changes to be made to the software loads in a completely reproducible manner, reducing user interaction needed by 75%. Redesigned and implemented the configuration management processes needed to create and deliver the software updates for the servers and workstations.- Designed and helped implement the Mission Control Center workstation responsible for remotely administering the International Space Station crew mission support LAN, which reduced the amount of time required for crew support of network – server and workstation – problems down 99% (meaning only for hardware swaps, media inserts/ejects, and physical power-on/power-off). Helped train and certify the first 12 people to operate the remote administration console.

Taught ITSC 1305: Introduction to Operating Systems - DOS, Linux/Unix, Windows for one semester (Spring, 2002). Students were taught the basics of the OS, automation techniques (batch files, scripting), GUI (graphical user interface) and command line steps to complete configurations, general introductory knowledge. The course used several real world examples to emphasize points.

Us

- Designed and implemented rollout of company standardized software to all of the company's Houston region computers resulting in a 50% reduction of Help Desk calls from users regarding software application failures. Calls that were made to the Help Desk regarding application problems were typically resolved 50 to 75% faster because of the standardized installation and configuration of the software.- Added domain and network security to user workstations, via Group Policy and login scripting, which resulted in 75% reduction of computer virus infections, better time synchronization for the user workstations, and laid the foundation for security updates to be quickly and correctly rolled out to user workstations. These efforts also reduced the number of calls to the help desk due to user errors on their workstations.

The Woodlands, Tx, Us

Responsible for updating and converting data for university purposes; responsible for generating reports based on administration requests. Biggest project was converting area codes in the student database to coincide with the newly established area-codes around the nation.

The Woodlands, Tx, Us

Handled Level 3 Helpdesk calls from Oncology doctors and nurses; worked with phone companies during network outages; supported State-level IT Coordinators for 18 different states. Worked on several high-visibility projects including the Y2K Team.

Houston, Texas, Us

Worked in the corporate office for several months, helping executives and secretaries with their computers. Worked with the network infrastructure group transitioning from Novell to Banyan VINES after the acquisition of the Western Company of North America. Worked as the lead computer technician and network admin support for The Woodlands office of the company for over a year, also defining and supporting the transition of the desktop hardware & software and network hardware & software for the company transition to a single standard. Transitioned to the Tomball office and continued working to unify and transition software and hardware in the UniChem laboratories and the BJ Services manufacturing and warehouse facilities.

Huntsville, Texas, Us

Hired as a dBase IV programmer. Was one of two people responsible for the Internal Affairs Division Novell network and all of the custom dBase IV programming. Was responsible for maintaining and updating the network OS, instituting backup tape rotation and off-site storage, defined and implemented the first disaster recovery plan. Coded specialized statistical counts of IAD data based on requests from other state government officials up to and including the State Governor (Richards). Also responsible for evaluating, choosing, setting up, training and supporting the IAD Investigators and Management with new laptops and software. Travelled to state prisons to help IAD Investigators solve computer-related crimes by prisoners.