Install and manage 1800+ physical and virtual servers across 20 Sky Broadcast platforms and services. Projects range in scale from single customised servers to builds of over 100 servers located in multiple data centres with High Availability technologies to provide resiliency.

• Provide Linux based technical expertise and solutions for Broadcast strategy.
• Liaise with Project Managers, varied stakeholders and external vendors to assure timely project deployments within budget.
• Draft documentation used by support team. Train department on tailored project implementation.
• Advocate and implement solutions in collaboration with design teams.
• Identify and introduce new IT trends for improved service delivery (build automation, cloud computing, DevOps and containerisation).
• Analyse requirements from application and design teams and implement solutions to meet business requirements compliant with audit, risk and security policies consistent with Infrastructure Support standards.
• Communicate status and risk points. Manage in-house consultants and workflow of junior staff.

• Built servers for Sky On Demand and Sky Adsmart to deliver customised content to Sky subscribers at rates of over 100 million downloads per month.
• Designed and implemented the Standard Operating Environment for RHEL6, RHEL7 and RHEL8 deployments using Spacewalk 2.9 and maintained ongoing compatibility matrices with third party software.
• Designed and implemented bespoke Red Hat Satellite 6 installation to provide regular operating system patching, errata reporting and subscription management of Red Hat products.
• Configured new VMware vSphere 5.5 Virtualisation platform as the preferred technology for new server builds to yield significant energy savings and operational streamlining. Automated deployment and configuration of ESXi hosts.
• Implemented OpsView Enterprise to monitor the health of the operating system, applications, and hardware on 1200+ servers.
• Installed and configured Open Source Puppet for the configuration management of 1000+ servers with Open Source Foreman as a reporting dashboard and Git as a version control system.
• Implemented Veritas SFHA, Volume Manager and Application HA on VMware to maximise availability of key services.
• Launched fortnightly team meeting to facilitate improvements by standardising workflow. Increased efficiency of the department by delegating and tracking progress of long-term infrastructure projects, and formally training staff on new automation tools and processes.

• Designed and implemented server architecture for improved operational resiliency and performance.
• Achieved 60% reduction of data centre costs through the introduction of the following initiatives, carried out on production environment:
* Identified and virtualised servers onto VMWare ESX 3, ESX 4i and VMware Server virtual environments, coupled with Red Hat Cluster Suite and DRBD for high availability.
* Migration of services to Amazon EC2 and S3 services including creation of Amazon Machine Images.
* Defined, documented and implemented hardened, standardised operating system images based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, CentOS 5 and FreeBSD 7. Migrated legacy operating systems (FreeBSD 4/5/6, Red Hat Linux 6/7, CentOS 3/4, SuSE 9, Solaris 2.6) onto customised images.

• Worked alongside off-site development team; installed and maintained development and QA environments; built stage environment to mirror production configuration.
• Managed NAS storage, capacity planning and replication to disaster recovery site; implemented substantially more sophisticated disaster recovery solution.
• Provided guidance to junior staff; created and implemented policies and procedures to ensure system security and availability, documentation of systems and operational runbooks.
• Managed and upgraded the following applications: OpenLDAP, Bind, MySQL, Postfix, Qmail, Apache, Tomcat and JBoss.
• Administered Windows estate including Microsoft Exchange 2003, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Windows Update Services 3.0, SharePoint Service 3.0, Desktop clients running Windows Vista/XP.

• Configured and managed over 100 SUN servers and workstations (Ultra 10's through V480), Windows 2003 Servers and IBM xSeries Linux Servers.
• Administered Sybase ASE database and Sybase Replication Server.
• Consulted on implementations at client sites integrating systems into production trading environments.
• Day-to-day management of support and demonstration environments including software and hardware upgrades, patch management and infrastructure design in a mixed Windows/Solaris environment.
• Provided 2nd and 3rd level support of Reuters Trade and Risk Management products to over 140 internal and external customers including problem replication, resolution and QA bug testing.
• Assisted pre-sales in the provision of demonstrations and architectural design of client proposals.

• Completed successful installation, configuration and upgrade of the following hardware: 40 Sun Ultra Enterprise servers (280R's, 420R's, 450's, 220R's, 250's, and Ultra 2's), 10 IBM xSeries Linux servers, 5 NT servers, Sun StorEdge T3/A1000/D1000's, 30 Sun Ultra workstations (10's, 30's), 50 Dell PC's, 10 Linux workstations, 15 IBM Laptops, 2 Cisco Catalyst 5000 switches, and 2 Symantec Raptor Firewalls.
• Administered Solaris & Windows NT File Servers, Lotus Notes Servers, Firewalls, Triarch, Sybase and application servers.
• Maintain system security from internal and external attacks, including Symantec Raptor Firewall management and VPN configuration.

• Provided 1st, 2nd and 3rd level technical support to Reuters Financial Information Database platforms. Systems supported include Development and Production environments spanning across 200+ NCR UNIX SVR4 nodes running the NCR Teradata Relational Database Management System and 50 Sun-Sparc Solaris nodes running Solaris and Oracle versions 7.3.4, 8.0.5 and 8.1.5.

• Provided 1st level support for financial database hosted on a suite of 30 UNIX nodes running UNIX SVR4 and the NCR Teradata Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). Ensured 99.5% service availability.

• Designed and implemented testing procedures for real-time industrial computer software; Maintained database of anomaly reports and status of testing; Duplicated anomalies encountered by customers.

Training
Red Hat OpenStack Administration (CL 210), January 2015
VMware vSphere 5.1 Fast Track, February 2013
Red Hat Enterprise Clustering And Storage Management (RH436), May 2012
Puppet Master Training, October 2011
Symantec High Availability Fundamentals, SFHA and VCS 5.1, October 2010

Virtualisation
VMware vSphere and ESXi 5.5, 6.5 and 6.7, Red Hat Virtualization 4, Red Hat Openstack Platform 5.0, Linux KVM.

Server Provisioning and Configuration Management
Red Hat Satellite 6.1 - 6.8, Foreman 1.20, Spacewalk 2.2 - 2.9, Ansible 2.3 - 2.10, Puppet 3.7, Hiera 1.3, Cobbler 2.2.

Clustering and HA
Veritas Storage Foundation HA/Infoscale (versions 5.1 - 7.4) - Cluster Server and Volume Manager, Symantec Application HA.

Web/Mail
Apache, Sendmail, Postfix, LAMP stack.

Network Services
SSH, DNS/BIND, NTP, NFS, LDAP, SMTP, Git, NFS, Samba, rsync, DHCP, Telnet, FTP.

Miscellaneous
Crowdstrike, OpsView Enterprise, HP Systems Insight Manager, Domain Name Management, HP ProLiant Blade and Server Hardware management Gen 5 through Gen 10 with ILO, Quest Authentication Services, PowerBroker.