Sam Webster Email & Phone Number

Dayton, Ohio, Us

•Using a combination of VMware, NetApp, Juniper, and Palo Alto - created hosting solutions that saved $173k annually in egress bandwidth costs, avoiding a potential $198k expenditure on equivalent AWS services.•Spearheaded SOC2 Type 1 and Type 2 certifications, acting as the primary liaison with auditors and authoring critical security policies, which helped the company respond to RFPs and Security Questionnaires faster.•To support company growth as well as future planning, directed the design and implementation of a company-owned data center, managing vendor relationships for electrical, HVAC, and fire suppression, while utilizing internal resources for compute, networking, and storage.•Transitioned from outdated systems to modern hypervisors, network designs, and configurations, establishing new facilities where existing ones were creating limitations for our Developers in production environments•Scaled the IT team from 2 to 9 members, including Helpdesk Technicians, System & Network Administrators, and System & Network Engineers to support new customers, new buildsings across the country, and new acquisitions across the world•Steered the company's technical direction involving Security, Hosting, Storage, and Networking, accepting requirements from internal departments to ensure final product met the business needs•Managed IT vendors to ensure complete service delivery according to SOW and MSA, while maintaining in-house projects to save costs and preserve institutional knowledge.

Dayton, Ohio, Us

• Designed, built, and deployed a 5-node all-flash VMWare VSAN to support a $250MM contract• Created company-wide file sharing service available on the public internet using Nextcloud• Responsible for 24x7x365 operation of all machines in the organization (Linux, Windows Servers - Windows and Apple workstations) across 3 datacenters and many satellite offices• Replaced entire network infrastructure on 4 floors in 11 network closets in 1 weekend at company HQ due to daisy-chained unmanaged switches causing broadcast storms• Built, deployed, and managed several Proxmox Virtual Environment systems consisting form 3-node up to 10 nodes supporting 300+ virtual machines • Deployed and manage the Zabbix monitoring and alerting system, configured escalating paging dependent upon the service/item that had issues, and tuned alerts to be meaningful and actionable• Built and deployed NFS and iSCSI back-end storage systems to support the Proxmox hypervisor• Lead project to implement security and fair-use policies with agreement from Sr. Management, HR, and Engineering stakeholders• Deployed and managed Cisco, Juniper, and Engenius switches, Cisco ASA firewalls, as well as open-source pfSense firewalls and routers• Created new server backup service for the organization, responsible for managing retention periods, backup schemes, and testing restores• Built the company chat system using Rocket.Chat that is used 24x7x365 for internal communications as well as Support channels • Utilized BASH to create a script that can look through a list of servers and update the interface name and restart networking• Built and manage internal IPAM system using Netbox and implemented policies to ensure it is kept up-to-date each time a system is introduced or decommissioned from Production• Configured and manage a network IDS using Suricata and an ELK stack, designed dashboards in Kibana for Sr. Management to have an understanding of threats and activity

Dayton, Ohio, Us

• Responsible for 24x7x365 operation of all Linux-based servers organization wide.• Contribute to departmental initiatives to improve technology, reduce risk and save money.• Perform routine maintenance and am the primary responder to alerts and outages based on performance and outages.• Take lead on Open Source initiatives, such as Crucible-WDS, FreeNas, and Alfresco.• Maintain Nagios instance for the group: creating/removing users, servers, and host groups.• Manage the backup policies for all critical data in the company, including off-site retention policies.• Develop, deploy Ansible playbooks to automate user management tasks in a mixed OS environment comprising of CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu 14 and even Debian3.• Assisted in the migration of backup tools used for production Oracle 10g instance from hot backups to RMAN, reducing our restore time from 1 day to 1 hour.• Replaced NetApp storage filer supporting VMware storage infrastructure for both dev and prod with an open source solution, transition incurred no downtime, and resulted in saving the company $25k/year.• Virtualized 15 systems using P2V tools and/or rebuilding systems, often times into a newer OS• Part of the Cultural Initiative that created and support corporate values, which lead to better customer relationships.• Provide Tier2 level help desk support for customer and user issues.

Dayton, Ohio, Us

• Resolved high priority and urgent requests from customers throughout the United States.• Developed and delivered training in various satellite offices for the flagship system.• Monitored and analyzed issue trends to preemptively identify potential future issues.• Presided as Network Owner of entire Costco TV Network product:-- Was primary point of escalation-- Created and Maintained Knowledgebase-- Represented Advanced Support Group in meetings on products and initiatives

Dayton, Ohio, Us

• Coordinated successful delivery of Smart Network project equipment across the country• Managed local inventory and storage warehouse• Created reporting protocols for Smart Network project, including inventory forecasting and snapshots• Developed executive level dashboard measuring key performance indicators of four departments• Dashboard saved executive management a total of six hours per week gathering and reviewing data

Dayton, Ohio, Us

• Audited Tier 1 helpdesk tickets for consistency, completeness, and follow-through• Created management dashboard to identify failed content deployments and reduce the number of negative revenue• Handled Tier 1 escalations covering server, network, and audio-visual equipment problems

London, Gb

• Point of escalation for trouble tickets and live calls for the flagship Successmaker product• Developed protocols, procedures, and templates for assisting educators with software issues• Assisted other leads with documentation organization and structure

London, Gb

• Assisted educators with Pearson Education products that are used in most classrooms across the country• Troubleshot technical issues ranging from broken shortcuts to corrupt databases

Charlotte, Nc, Us

• Walked loan officers through resolving detailed underwriting issues• Resolve miscellaneous user issues and override requests

Phoenix, Az, Us

• Handled frontline student issues to facilitate a smooth online education experience