Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Summary

Currently, storage architect for large global financial, working in the Global Storage Strategy & Architecture team.

Responsible for identifying, proof of concepting, and driving new technologies to enable future growth and agility of the organisation. Also responsible for the architecture and deployment of aforementioned new technologies. Responsible for designing best practices that suit the business and are not just one-size-fits-all best practices as usually suggested by vendors. Many deployments have been innovative and acknowledged by senior engineers within vendors as excellent practice.

Excellent track record of delivering new and innovative solutions, at pace, in high pressure environments. Many solutions have been well ahead of the curve and enabled significant benefits to the business.

Significant experience Proof Of Concepting and beta testing vendor equipment. Uncovered several bugs in both production as well as beta technology.

Excellent at managing and driving value out of vendors. Excellent team player with excellent communication skills.

Major Technologies

EMC VMAX, DMX, VNX, Isilon – IBM XIV, V7000, ProtecTIER, SVC, N-Series – Hitachi VSP, USP V, AMS – HP 3PAR, EVA, XP, P9500 – NetApp FAS – Brocade and Cisco SANs.

Significant Achievements

Active Directory Fast Forest Recovery Solution

Designed and delivered the worlds first* Microsoft Active Directory fast recovery solution based on storage array based snapshots.

Incumbent tape based recovery was discovered to take several days to fully recover just the Data Center AD estate from a replicated logical corruption. This was an unacceptable risk to the business which operated in a heavily regulated environment.

The Fast Forest Recovery solution was able to –

Recover individual Domain Controllers in less than 20 minutes
Recover the entire Data Center AD estate in just a few hours

* It is believed, from working with vendors (Microsoft, storage vendors and backup product vendors) that this was the first time such a solution was ever successfully implemented.

Very Early Thin Provisioning and Wide Striping Deployment

POC Testing and production delivery of a very early thin provisioning and wide striping based storage architecture for a large organisation that struggled with speed of deployment and deployment costs and complexity. The new architecture enabled the business to more quickly to deploy storage as well as reduce and offset costs associated with disk procurements.

Large Scale NAS deployment

Driven the adoption of NAS technology to a large multi-national organisation.

Previously the organisation was end-to-end Fibre Channel block storage. Able to instigate a mindset change to deploy cheaper and more simple NAS technologies in appropriate scenarios. Some of these scenarios included smaller regional sites as well as emerging markets. The deployment of multi-protocol NAS technologies enabled –

Future proofing the IT estate. Start today with file protocols such as NFS and CIFS, but have ability to add iSCSI, FCP and FCoE in the future if required
Significantly reduce the costs in these areas. Previously, expensive block arrays with HBA’s and dedicated switches was stunting the the organisations ability to make profit in these markets
Significantly improve speed to market in these markets

Architect for the above NAS deployment.

Thin Auto-tiering Architecture

Architected and designed multi-petabyte thinly provisioned auto-tiered storage service based on the latest and greatest storage technologies. One of the first deployments globally.

Companies Worked For

Vendors – IBM, HDS, HP

Other – Barclays Bank, Halifax Bank of Scotland (now Lloyds Banking Group), Danske Bank, Nathan Myer Rothschild & Sons Ltd, EDS (now HP), CSC, Newell Rubbermaid, Convergys.

Some of the above were as a contractor and sub-contractor from a vendor.