My current role is working as part of the ‘Hosting Team’ at Servelec, providing 24/7 ‘Fully Managed Hosting solutions for NHS Healthcare, Social Care and Education (local government) via our growing private cloud platform. Together as a team we manage & maintain highly available shared infrastructure, using virtualisation technologies that include VMWare based hypervisors and ‘software defined networking’ via VMWare NSX. We work with Dell Compellent, Equalogic SANs, QSAN & ZFS NAS Solutions to provide a resilient shared storage infrastructure. Veeam rapid recovery, Quest Rapid Recovery & VMWare Site Recovery Manager allow us to provide reliable backup & disaster recovery solutions to the customers.

Upon finishing university I was asked to come back to SHSC. This was initially to complete a 2000 to 2003 Windows domain migration. The success of this project led to other opportunities within the department, including the opportunity to become a systems engineer. Roles and responsibilities included being part of the operations team, who were responsible for core IT systems, and projects in the department that influence spending of the IT budget.Working in the public sector for 5 years, I also provide on-call services for the department on a weekly rota, and I am required to make decisions in lieu of the IT director should a critical system fail.I played a major role in spearheading our migration to virtual servers, and as a result I built up a firm understanding of VMware Vsphere products. This includes implementing a VM backup strategy using Veeam backup and replication.I recently undertook a project, focused on overhauling our storage strategy within a limited budget, while providing more efficient storage provisioning than the current Netapp 2050 SAN we had. I managed to migrate our data to a more cost effective solution whilst also providing greater resilience. This was achieved by purchasing five new Dell SANs and creating a better backup strategy, migrating to disk only storage. Our new disaster recovery capabilities are more efficient than before, massively reducing our RTO while expanding our backup archive.

On placement for my degree, I worked in the IT department for a mental health trust that supported 1700 computers, 3000 users and 50 sites across Sheffield. I started work as 1st line help desk staff, taking calls and completing call log tickets. Proving my skills further by implementing a Microsoft WSUS server and SSRPM, the latter allowed users to reset their own passwords without phoning the IT help desk. Both successful projects are still in operation today.