Robert Blount Email & Phone Number

York

York, England, United Kingdom

All of the Platform Solutions Architect responsibility's mentioned below but also mentoring other members of the team to help them progress their knowledge and career.

York, England, United Kingdom

Working as a Platform Solutions Architect I am responsible for the Pre Sales of anything that's in a DC. The primary focus is Microsoft, VMware and Dell technologies and also include Azure, AWS from a public cloud. But can also span to LAN's, WAN's, WiFi and Security. Hyperconverged infrastructure of Nutanix and Azure Stack and requirements can go as far as multi-cloud management platforms. The role is incredibly varied over a multitude of technologies for which I gather the customer requirements and create a proposal with Visio diagrams, commercials and Statement of Works.

York, United Kingdom

See above

Leeds, United Kingdom

A temporary position to help get the company off of the ground and help customers with challenges they face.

Wakefield, England, United Kingdom

In charge of a team of Architects and consultants within the cloud department with the overall responsibility of the cloud infrastructure, future designs, products and strategy of the cloud for GCI. Cloud Pre-Sales also fell into the role as I had built the replicated and resilient cloud platform I would be the authority to speak with customers to find a solution to their challange.

Worcester, United Kingdom

I am responsible for the design and implementation of GCI’s multi-tenanted, geographically dispersed, enterprise cloud. In line with our in house and client requirements, the solution is easily scalable, meets performance targets and is fully resilient. To achieve these goals I used COTS solutions from various best in class vendors such as VMware vCloud Suite for underlying hyper-visor, management and future scaling visibility to Zerto for excellent replication and near zero RPO and just a few minutes for RTO.Once the initial cloud environment was deployed within GCI’s Data centers I started to design and implement key products and services that would be strategic to my company’s growth. These include VDI (both Pure VDI and RDS), DR as a service and Backup as a service.Upon completion, I focused on the design and implementation of an automation solution to remove the lengthy delivery times of manual provisioning.I am also responsible for the full product life cycle of GCI’s cloud environment and the cloud products that are deployed onto the infrastructure, along with the day to day running of the cloud team and the strategy for the cloud department.

Birstall

Within my team of Cloud Architecture I am responsible for the design and implementation of key hosted and managed solutions. The recent hosted solutions have been application performance monitoring and a variety of SaaS solutions such as Lync and SharePoint. The managed solutions I design are leading technologies such as App-V through to large VDI and outsourced data centre solutions. A great deal of the projects I undertake are either new to the company or are within beta from the vendor with the most recent being an enterprise POC solution to showcase Phoenix’s VDI ability’s under multi-vendor platforms within very tight time frames.

Wakefield, United Kingdom

My role at ICM is to develop new products and deliver them to the business in a completed package. This includes sales material, support documentation and architectural outlines of the product. I am also responsible for the complete product life cycles of the solutions I develop. These solutions include a Managed SRM (Site Recovery Manager) with heterogeneous SAN to SAN replication and also eOffice an award winning VDI platform for customer invocation purposes. All products are key to the client’s disaster recovery plans and must fall in line with strict RPO’s and RTO’s.

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Lead the handover of Europe’s largest Microsoft VDI platform from solutions to support. Create the necessary documentation and provide training to the support department. Resolve any issues that arise in the interim and implement improvements along the way to the solution.

Stockley Park

Having been with Vialtus through two brand changes I am now responsible for the productising and re productising of existing and new solutions as and when they emerge. Provide support to Technical Presales on new solutions that utilise new technologies and then create standard products out of the bespoke designs and develop and deliver training around the new products. These solutions include developing a standard product for SQL 2008 database mirroring that would be geographically dispersed across two data centres using either Synchronous/Asynchronous database replication dependant on client needs.

Oxford, United Kingdom

My remit in this position was to facilitate a successful migration of 250 servers from the Nildram Data Centre to HEX (London) and Server Bank Vault (Manchester). I also headed up 3rd line support for Nildram thorough these times and also provided a new design and plans to migrate 5000 legacy websites on two disparate complex systems onto one simple solution and migrate the platform to Manchester. Once this work was completed my next task was to design and build a cross data centre backup solution for both HEX and SBV to provide reliable and disaster tolerant backups to our SME client base and to produce a standard product that can be sold as part of Pipex’s Enterprise and Application hosting offerings.

Stoke Mandeville

Initially responsible for the improvement of the Nildram Data Centre and the design of all current and future external Windows solutions working in the network architecture team. This includes creating and standardising all system documentation with support procedures and also the design of any improvements e.g. server patch management, Consolidated firewall and virtualisation of certain solutions. Took on the role of 3rd line team leader to help support the Nildram brand and provide an interface between Pipex and the sister company Nildram.

Northallerton

Responsible for assisting in the rolling out and support of a Force-wide Windows 2000 Active Directory solution. This includes Exchange 2000, SQL Server, ISA Server, Websence and various other solutions as well as bespoke software and Dell hardware installation including clustering and fibre channel EMC SAN. Also responsible in providing support throughout all levels of the organisation.Recent Projects: -Recently in charge of designing architecture for a mission critical, highly available, scaleable solution with near disaster tolerance for a major force application. Used dual HP EVA 5000 with 4 node Windows 2003 SQL Cluster.

Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Main roles and responsibilities include Designing and supporting SME networks with various low to high-end technical requirements. All projects would require excellent team work and communication closely coupled with documentation and client sign off. Some of my work included providing another layer of technical support and consultancy too Western Wines internal IT staff and infrastructure. Through too providing complete consultancy and full IT support of the Dairi-Pak infrastructure.

Derby, United Kingdom

Responsible for designing and implementing a European load balanced streaming media network, which caters for high bandwidth network traffic. Key player in all stages from specification to supplier liaison and role out. This network was utilised for high profile events such as Madonna at Brixton, which recorded 9 Million Low-High bandwidth streams over 3 hours.Further work included enabling Scottish Parliament to stream all of there daily parliamentary sessions to a wide audience with low user intervention. Consultancy and design for a wide range of clients such as Sony music Europe to MSN.

Tamworth

Initially trainee support engineer and quickly gaining promotion to Software Support Manager. Providing Pre/Post Sales consultancy to the client and designing/installing new business solutions. I also managed a team of engineers and was responsible for merging three departments into one to improve efficiencies.Involved in designing and supporting a verity of SME clients in various aspects of IT from Financial to Communications solutions and Windows NT Server to Novell systems. Which ranged from Midlands Co-Operative Society, key player in designing/upgrading and supporting there infrastructure along with ascertaining weaknesses in their technical architecture, to Virgin Airship and Balloon Company which involved designing a support solution and technical documentation of their whole range of systems.