Greg Cain

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE:

Expe­ri­enced Senior Sys­tem Engi­neer with a pen­chant for iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lems, find­ing solu­tions and help­ing an IT orga­ni­za­tion move towards a more mature, proac­tive role.   I have exten­sive expe­ri­ence with a wide range of tech­nolo­gies, but I’m most proud of my abil­ity to bring together my team, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy (IT), and cus­tomers to work towards a com­mon goal.  The unique com­bi­na­tion of tech­ni­cal abil­i­ties and com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills is what is going to allow me to help your busi­ness suc­ceed.   My recent expe­ri­ence has focused on VMware tech­nolo­gies, from both a high level (archi­tect­ing, siz­ing, etc.) and a lower, hands on level (imple­men­ta­tion, train­ing and trou­bleshoot­ing.) As such, I’m uniquely posi­tioned to help your busi­ness, your IT depart­ment and your Sys­tem Engi­neer team as your vir­tu­al­iza­tion efforts move, change or grow.

EMPLOYMENT:

Novem­ber 2010 — Decem­ber 2010: Travel Sabbatical

Explored Aus­tralia and New Zealand

2009 – Octo­ber 2010: Senior Sys­tem Engi­neer, the­P­lat­form for Media, Incorporated

Sup­ported a 24x7 Pro­duc­tion Data Cen­ter, a Dis­as­ter Recov­ery Data Cen­ter and a Qual­ity Assur­ance and Stag­ing Data Cen­ter focused on help­ing con­tent providers, broad­band media sites, and mobile busi­nesses solve their unique media pub­lish­ing require­ments using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies and indus­try best practices.

• Helped plan, imple­ment and sup­port the intro­duc­tion of VMware ESX server/VSphere into the­P­lat­form. The imple­men­ta­tion was first done in QA and Stag­ing to set a base­line of per­for­mance and reli­a­bil­ity for the appli­ca­tions we sup­port. As the con­fi­dence grew, we started mov­ing infra­struc­ture machine to our VMware clus­ter. Most of the QA, Stag­ing and the Dis­as­ter Recov­ery envi­ron­ment is full virtualized.
• Helped build a new East Coast Dis­as­ter Recov­ery Data Cen­ter, includ­ing the roll out of a new server plat­form (Cisco UCS Blades) and a remote man­age­ment model.
• Worked with devel­op­ers to trou­bleshoot per­for­mance and tun­ing issues, espe­cially as related to Java mem­ory siz­ing, in the vir­tu­al­ized envi­ron­ment. We also helped our devel­op­ers do per­for­mance test­ing to ver­ify cer­tain best prac­tices, espe­cially as related to num­bers of cores per Vir­tual Machine.
• Imple­mented Indus­try best prac­tices for time keep­ing, solv­ing most, if not all, time related issues.
• Archi­tected, planned and installed a robust patch­ing sys­tem based on cost effec­tive best prac­tices for both the Win­dows and Unix envi­ron­ments. Was able to stan­dard­ized patch­ing in such a way as to patch and test in QA and Stag­ing before imple­ment­ing the patches in our Pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment. For the Linux side, we also cre­ated our own repos­i­tory for deploy­ing cus­tom appli­ca­tions and patches that weren’t avail­able in the stan­dard repositories.
• Imple­mented a Revi­sion Con­trol sys­tem for key sys­tem files, and cre­ated var­i­ous mon­i­tors in Zenoss to allow for mon­i­tor­ing of appro­pri­ate file ver­sions across the enterprise.
• Worked with our Sup­port Oper­a­tions Center(SOC) to imple­ment a robust and appro­pri­ate access esca­la­tion process, and cre­ated robust sup­port­ing doc­u­ments, reduc­ing the num­ber of after hours calls that need to be esca­lated to the On-Call Sys­tem Engineer.
• Exten­sive use, and famil­iar­ity with, Agile Project Man­age­ment methods.
• Work­ing with var­i­ous teams (Devel­op­ers, Deploy­ment, Net­work Engi­neers, DBA, and SE’s), to develop a slim, yet fully func­tional server image for all of our envi­ron­ments. This was done to reduce sys­tem load, increase secu­rity and to min­i­mize disk space needed. On the Linux (Cen­tOS) build were able to real­ized a 30% sav­ing in disk space on our disk images and reduced the num­ber of appli­ca­tions installed by 70%.
• Imple­mented best prac­tice build method­ol­ogy for our Win­dows, Linux and VMware servers. The time required to build a fully func­tion server was cut down from two weeks to two days. Was also able to semi-automate the qual­ity check (QC) of the fin­ished build, turn­ing a 30 minute man­ual task into a 2 minute review.
• Iden­ti­fied and elim­i­nated sev­eral key sin­gle points of fail­ure before they became prob­lems (NTP, sudo per­mis­sions, etc.)
• Cre­ated and ran train­ing classes for both our SOC, other Sys­tem Engi­neers and other inter­ested par­ties (Net­work Engi­neers, DBA’s, etc.)
• Auto­mated var­i­ous VMware task and retrieved met­rics using Pow­er­Shell and PowerCLI

2006 – 2009: Sys­tem Oper­a­tions Spe­cial­ist III, Walt Dis­ney Inter­net Group/Disney Inter­ac­tive Media Group

Respon­si­ble for oper­a­tional sup­port and man­age­ment activ­i­ties involved with the phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture required to host Disney’s online busi­nesses includ­ing, but not lim­ited to ABC, ESPN and Dis­ney, which com­prise the 9th most vis­ited site on the Inter­net. Respon­si­bil­i­ties include the plan­ning, instal­la­tion, test­ing, main­te­nance, doc­u­men­ta­tion and sup­port of server hard­ware, sys­tems soft­ware, mon­i­tor­ing and man­age­ment agents and the data cen­ter phys­i­cal plant. Key accom­plish­ments include:

• Helped test, imple­ment and sup­port VMware in our test and pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment. Ini­tially the focus was on our redun­dant inter­nal sup­port sys­tems (DNS, Ter­mi­nal Servers, Domain Controllers,etc.), but as our our cus­tomers became com­fort­able with the per­for­mance, sup­port and reli­a­bil­ity the plat­form offered, we expanded to include a very large sub­set of our envi­ron­ment. As of July 2008, 250 machines have been vir­tu­al­ized, with approx­i­mately 50 hav­ing been P2V’ed. This was done to con­sol­i­date servers resources and to allow for load bal­anc­ing. It also allowed our Data Cen­ter model to mature from a hard­ware host­ing model (i.e. I need a DL385) to a resource allo­ca­tion model ( i.e. I need to be able to process 3500 trans­ac­tions a second.)
• Uti­liz­ing var­i­ous tools (GPOs, Blade­L­ogic, etc.) worked towards the stan­dard­iza­tion and sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of our envi­ron­ment. These tasked ranged from some­thing as sim­ple as “show NIC in taskbar when con­nected” to ver­i­fy­ing appro­pri­ate build level of appro­pri­ate and essen­tial drivers.
• Solely respon­si­ble for the instal­la­tion, stan­dard­iza­tion, reli­a­bil­ity and sup­port of Syman­tec Anti-Virus CE on approx­i­mately 1350 win­dows clients. Went from a largely unman­aged instal­la­tion (less than 1000 clients had SAV installed, but of those, only a very small por­tion were cor­rectly updat­ing.) Cur­rently, we have three SAV servers, spread across two Data Cen­ters, with 100% of our clients get­ting updates daily.
• Drove the improve­ment in our Con­fig­u­ra­tion Man­age­ment Data­base (CMDB) from approx­i­mately 96% to 99.99%. This was accom­plished by get­ting team buy-in on the neces­sity of CMDB accu­racy along with aggres­sive record keep­ing, data­base sleuthing and a large amount of hands on verification.
• Owned and stan­dard­ized the Win­dows sys­tem patch­ing pro­ce­dure. This included ver­i­fy­ing rel­e­vant sys­tems as related to busi­ness groups, stan­dard­iza­tion of the patch­ing work­flow, doc­u­men­ta­tion of the processes and pro­ce­dures and train­ing the rest of the group as to pre­vent a sin­gle point of fail­ure. I was also respon­si­ble for the MS Patch Tues­day monthly meet­ing and for fol­low­ing up with Busi­ness Units on imple­men­ta­tion of patches across the envi­ron­ment. Shav­lik HFNetChkPro and Microsoft’s WSUS were used, but at the time of my depar­ture there was an effort to move to Blade Logic.
• Sin­gu­larly respon­si­ble for the imple­men­ta­tion of the March 2007 Day­light Sav­ings Time patch­ing and reme­di­a­tion across 2000+ Win­dows, Linux and Solaris servers, span­ning two con­ti­nents and three coun­tries. 100% were reme­di­ated by the date of the time zone change.
• Per­formed sec­ond and third tier pro­duc­tion sup­port on a daily basis and as part of an on-call rotation.
• Became pro­fi­cient sup­port­ing Linux (Red­hat and Fedora mainly), Win­dows Servers (2000 and 2003) and the nec­es­sary sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture, includ­ing DNS, AD, http redi­rect, etc.
• Helped cre­ate a mature work­ing model for remote admin­is­tra­tion as we moved from two to three Data Cen­ters. Our level of sup­port ranged from true on-site sup­port (e.g. – capa­ble of almost all admin­is­tra­tive task) to Smart Hands sup­port, offer­ing only min­i­mal tech­ni­cal assistance.
• Worked to imple­ment Pay­ment Card Indus­try (PCI) Data Secu­rity Stan­dard (DSS) across a sub­set of our sys­tems. As the PCI stan­dards matured and pro­gressed, our goal became to apply the more strin­gent PCI stan­dards to our entire environment.
• Became pro­fi­cient work­ing inter­na­tional con­tacts. WDIG has servers all over the world, and sup­port needs spanned from Lon­don to Hun­gary and Sin­ga­pore to China. Each of those dis­parate groups had dif­fer­ent needs and com­mu­ni­ca­tions issues and difficulties.

2005: Travel Sabbatical

Trav­eled Solo through­out Mex­ico, Cen­tral Amer­ica and most of the United States on a BMW 1150GS Motor­cy­cle, and over­land the length of South America.

1997–2004: Senior Unix Admin­is­tra­tor, AT&T Wire­less Services

Over an 8 year period took on more of a lead­er­ship role and grew respon­si­bil­i­ties with the expan­sion of the server envi­ron­ment. Led geo­graph­i­cally dis­persed team in pro­vid­ing proac­tive sup­port to inter­nal client appli­ca­tions includ­ing Axys (pro­pri­etary sys­tem), Siebel, and data­bases such as Sybase and Ora­cle. Key accomplishments:

• Grow­ing mainly HP/UX and Solaris server envi­ron­ment from approx­i­mately 50 to 100+.
• Han­dled all admin­is­tra­tion, back­ups, capac­ity plan­ning, and dis­as­ter recovery.
• Drove all hir­ing includ­ing expan­sion of team from one to eight FTE Sys­tem Administrators.
• Planned and imple­mented three dat­a­cen­ter moves involv­ing mil­lions of dol­lars of hard­ware with min­i­mal down­time and no loss of data.

EDUCATION:

1988: Uni­ver­sity of Cen­tral Florida

Bach­e­lors of Arts in Busi­ness Administration

TECHNOLOGIES:

VMware ESX Server/Vsphere (4+ years), Linux (8+ years), Win­dows Server (6+ years), Agile Project Man­age­ment (2+ year), HP-UX (8 years), SEEK Raid Arrays (8 years), Solaris (4 years), OS X (7+ years + 6 years Openstep/Nextstep), Legato Net­Worker (2 years), Ver­i­tas Net­Backup (1 year), Ver­i­tas File Sys­tem, (3 years), ADIC (3 years), Net­work Appli­ance NetApp (4+ years), HP Sys­tem Insight Man­ager (3+ year), Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Infra­struc­ture Library (ITIL) via HP Open­view Ser­vice Desk (2 years), Shav­lik HFNetChkPro v5 (2 years), Win­dows Server Update Ser­vice (WSUS) (4+ years), Syman­tec Anti-Virus (2 ),TCP/IP Net­work­ing & related pro­to­cols includ­ing http, SMTP, LDAP/Sendmail, NFS, DNS, DHCP, FTP, SSH, SAMBA, LAN/WAN topol­ogy, shell script­ing, Perl, Java, AIX, HP Open­view, Apache Web Server, Microsoft IIS, Pow­er­shell, Pow­er­CLI, Data­Do­main, Cisco UCS Blade Enclo­sures, Python

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