Working within the Mainframe migration team on a major project to migrate all Aviva IT systems to a new three site resilient data centre solution. Advised with the new disaster recovery and GDPS strategy, configuration and testing.Developed and implemented a firewall solution to allow concurrent production testing to be performed alongside live production.

Fulfilling successive projects by creating Infrastructure designs on a wide IT platform range. Working closely with the business and colleague architects to define the major technology and infrastructure elements needed to meet the Bank’s present and future business and IT strategy. Working on projects with annual budgets of up to £60m. Providing strategic direction and guidance on all technical aspects of the development and modification to infrastructure policies, standards and security requirements. Acted as Technical Lead Architect on a three year programme for the design and build of a new highly resilient data centre along with the migration of the associated applications, the migration solution and production of the low level technical migration plans and run books in conjunction with IBM, using their Data Centre Migration Methodology (DCMM). Part of the core team responsible for implementing IBM’s Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) as a major transformation project delivering a strategic Transaction Management Hub into the Lloyds Payment landscape. Additionally working as the Infrastructure lead for the Bank’s platform wide scheduling system, Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS), ensuring all scheduling system upgrades are performed under the most exacting controls due to the high impact a failure could present. Assisted with the development and customisation of IBM’s Rational Team Concert (RTC) and Rational Solution Architect (RSA), which has become the design tool for the Infrastructure Architects using Topology Modeling Language (TML). Implemented a Cloud based Transaction Monitor for the Lloyds Anti Money Laundering systems.

Contract role within the UK and Ireland Professional Services Group, designing and implementing storage solutions at client sites.Key assignments included data centre migrations, technical refresh and site cut over, Auto Swapping of data centres, Data Mirroring, TDMF, SRDF setup and configuration of VMAX Storage Arrays. Visited various EMC clients onsite installing and configuring recently acquired hardware, including customisation of EMC software products to achieve optimum performance. Accompanied sales teams within the field as a Technical Consultant.

Member of the global team providing systems support using a Follow the Sun model with specific accountability for five European data centres. Played integral role in three new data centre builds with the migration of the associated Business applications and workloads, planning, designing, documenting and configuring the infrastructure and developing the migration cutover. Worked closely with hardware vendors (IBM, EMC, Cisco and Brocade) to design environments to achieve ISO 9001 certification and ensuring appropriate failover solutions were tested and embedded. Negotiated with Business Application units to produce a successful buy in to the project and the wave testing, enabling a cost effective and resilient infrastructure.Developed and engineered Citi’s mainframe implementation of a three-site Disaster Recovery solution, heading the bi-annual country to country Business Recovery tests moving live workloads from any European data centre to mirror sites, to audit system robustness in accordance with UK and US Banking legal regulations. Liaised with Global hardware and software vendors to ensure that a worldwide standard approach to maintenance and code levels was applied to mitigate risk and exposure.

Initially appointed to complete a Y2K compliance project upgrading and configuring all OEM software products and IBM operating systems for Cap Gemini’s clients to ensure the applications transitioned into the year 2000 without fault, including systems testing with IBM in their labs to simulate date changes in a controlled environment. Subsequently acted as Solution Architect in conjunction with IBM Global Services to design and implement an IBM mainframe Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) for Citibank to provide a fully automated seamless workload fail over in the event of a disaster.

Managed large user environments for ExxonMobil, Save & Prosper and British Aerospace. Key project, relocating the British Aerospace workloads, requiring high level of clearance from the MOD. Installed and configured StorageTek silos and the supporting software. Gave training courses to the Data Administration Group and Operations staff.

Worked on several major software and hardware projects, including the design and construction of a new European datacentre and several global datacentre migrations. In collaboration with IBM Consultancy Services implemented one of the first UK commercial installations to use CICS and SAP in a multisystem configuration. Technical Lead for the global standardisation of the ACF2 Mainframe security and was also responsible for the global datacentre disaster recovery planning. Part of the team which accomplished the relocation of the Mobil Oil Pacific-Rim mainframe applications from Melbourne to Dallas Texas. Seconded to IBM Global Services to consult during the UK relocation of the Woolwich and Barclays IT mainframe systems.