I work in the technical pre-sales team at COOLSPIRiT providing storage and data management solutions to a wide variety of sectors including:- NHS- Construction- Councils- Oil and Gas- Education- Financial- Broadcast and MediaI specialise in data storage, backup and archiving solutions and have extensive experience in project deployment.I have an excellent level of understanding of the value of acquiring and building customer relationships and ways in which this can be achieved. Furthermore, I work well with others, and I am experienced in designing and delivering materials at all levels within a company.For more than 15 years COOLSPIRiT has been supplying the UK’s top organisations with storage products and solutions. Offering friendly independent advice on all things data, we aim to help you future proof all of your data storage needs. From tier one storage to a single piece of LTO tape, COOLSPIRiT can offer best of breed technology and the expertise to deliver End2End. It’s all about getting things right first time, quickly and simply.

Having progressed from a senior Microsoft engineers role, training junior engineers to ensure customer service and technical understanding were to a solid standard. I had gotten a taste of a balance of team management, customer service and technical resolution across a whole variety of products. This lead me to express my interest to our senior management in developing a team to develop new services and ultimately a new focus on data protection for our customers. At the time the business had utilised two products readily available to the open market in Bacula and Microsoft DPM of which they both had their significant limitations. I was keen to review the market to see what solutions we could find that would offer:- Minimised and centralised management through a single GUI for multiple data centres and multi-tenanted environments- Source-side deduplication- Scalability- Wide-scale application integration (SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, Oracle, MySQL, Hyper-V, VMWare, etc)- Storage array snapshotsThe requirements presented us with a few options but ability to execute along with the commercial aspects resulted in us choosing CommVault. This would now mean that the business could start to build on data protection and Disaster Recovery services over multiple UK based data centres. At this point not only were the team's service offerings growing but the size of the team was too. I had a team of six managing and maintaining backups for over 10,000 servers in both physical and virtual formats, inclusive of the successful eCloud platform. This was also contributing positive figures to the companies revenue and the year on year growth that we were experiencing.

I was employed to join UKFast's rapidly expanding technical team as a Microsoft Windows engineer primarily supporting dedicated, but also virtual servers running applications ranging from IIS to Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft SQL. Other skill sets within this role would include Active Directory, PHP, MySQL and Terminal Services. More roles within this position would entail:• Software support for dedicated and virtual servers, primarily on Windows based platforms but also Linux variants.• Data security, permissions and on-going risk assessment.• Support of UKFast's Cloud, shared Exchange environment.• Supporting clients technical needs, including: communicating in a non-technical language to ensure client requirements and expectations are understood and achieved.• Installation and configuration of single server solutions up to high availability solutions and enterprise level support for a large UK server hosting company.Within six months of this role, I was given the responsibility of training and developing new members of the team to ensure customer service and technical knowledge was of a suitable level before they covered any shift work.

I was initially employed to cover desktop support, over time I've progressively and quite extensively picked up knowledge with server-based technologies such as Microsoft SQL, Active Directory, Citrix, Cisco's CallManager and Unity products - along with Dell server and NetApp storage hardware with basic networking knowledge.I've also covered a lot of the development for internal Web 2.0 technologies using Wiki's for intranets and knowledge management. Which from an independant study in July 2009; was mentioned as one of the most (if not the most) comprehensively designed internal Web 2.0 innovations in the legal industry within the UK.Leading on from the work I had done with the Web 2.0 projects, I was becoming more and more involved with the external sites, helping with general development and comprehensive SEO.

• Maintenance and development of the network infrastructure, including a fully integrated telephony system.• Support for all hardware and software systems on company’s UK network.• To advise my line manager (the Managing Director) on hard and software upgrades; and replacement systems.• European technical support engineer, responsible for the direct and remote support of various branches across EU (using RealVNC or Dameware Remote Administration tools).• Maintaining and developing network backup system: inc. data sources for incremental and full back-ups; and setting schedules, including tape rotation.• Data security, permissions and on-going risk assessment.• IT Project management, e.g. recently managed a full network overhaul, migrating the network from an NT4 domain using PDC’s and BDC’s to a full Microsoft Server 2003 Active Directory Domain with an integrated Microsoft Exchange mail system.• Installation of new IT equipment, ranging from servers, to desktops, to switches, routers or hubs.• Maintenance of Active Directory Database• Supporting users, including: communicating in non-technical language and maintaining the help desk database.Other skills or familiar technologies include:• DNS• DHCP• VPN• Firewalls