Thomas H. Jones II

Principal Engineer: This position allowed me to provide extensive across the IT industry I provided architecture, implementation-planning, technology analysis and implementation services on behalf of several large vendors. Customers included large financial institutions, government, DOD and intelligence communities. Some project highlights include:

• Planning and implementation of a migration from HACMP to Veritas Cluster server for a large financial institution. Project was carried out on AIX Power-series systems using EMC Symmetrix storage with SRDF. Provided implementation design and assistance services. Wrote a number of tools to perform the migrations and extensively documented the solution.
• lanning and integration tasks for a DoD customer pursuing server consolidation through virtualization. Solution covered storage from NetApp, servers by Dell, virtualization by VMware and data protection (backups) by Veritas/Symantec.
• Migration from EMC's EDM tape archive solution to Symantec's Veritas NetBackup product for a large, Federal agency with many Terabytes of personal and financial data. Provided migration-planning, implementation and extensive automation and documentation services for the project. NetBackup implementation included Oracle, MSSQL, application server and unstructured data backups. EMC Symmetrix used for SAN and leveraged BCVs for zero-downtime backups.
• Provided planning and implementation assistance for a customer moving from Oracle 9i (standalone) to Oracle 10g RAC. Oracle environment consisted of Sun Solaris, HDS TagmaStore, and Veritas Storage Foundation HA/DR.
• Wrote several competitive technology analysis documents for different federal and federal contractor customers as part of various "technology refresh" and "future technologies" projects. Technologies covered included storage, virtualization, high availability and disaster recovery management.
• Multiple, clustered implementations of SAP. Implementation included planning, prototyping and validation of local and wide-area clustered solutions. Leveraged technologies from IBM and Sun for hosts, from EMC and HDS for storage, and Symantec for clustering and data management tasks. Customers included a large DoD ERP project and several financial services firms.
• Provided implementation and software customization services for a well-known healthcare provider's HP/UX-based cluster implementation.
• rovided implementation services for several state and federal agencies' data replication and disaster recovery projects. Services included replication setup, creation of "human-friendly" replication management tools and extensive process documentation.
• Provided planning and implementation assistance for large aerospace customers and federal agencies for projects involving Solaris-based clustering and virtualization efforts. Implementations included VCS, Sun Cluster 3 and Solaris 10 Zones/Containers and ZFS on various storage platforms.

Senior Operations Engineer (IV): This was the most senior technical position within the Unix Operations group. The Unix Operations group, as a whole, was responsible for the day to day management of over 1400 Sun Enterprise and SunFire class servers, world wide. Operations engineers were charged with acting as support and coordination resources for the Operations group. In this role:

• I was tasked with creating and conducting internal technology training on various high-availability and replication projects. This training was targeted for use both inside and outside of the Operations group
• I was tasked with infrastructure planning and deployment;
• I handled resolution of issues that arose with business-critical and high-profile customers.
• Acted as a team-lead and escalation point for the shift-based escalation engineers
• Acted as the resident high-availability expert (with in-depth knowledge of both Veritas Cluster Server ? Digex?s primary clustering solution - and SunCluster 3.x);
• Acted as a pre- and post-sales technical resource;
• Performed site design, analysis and redesign for select customers;
• Provided migration and upgrade planning. This included formulating procedures for both individual customers and datacenter-wide efforts;
• Provide incident analysis, reporting and post-incident prevention planning.
The above duties typically required extensive staff mentoring, interdepartmental coordination and contact with customers - by phone, written correspondence and in person.

Applications Support Engineer Team Lead: During early phase of providing application support services, I was charged with helping hire and organize the group that became the (Java) Application Support Team. This required gaining a basic familiarity with the products supported at the time. This familiarity aided in troubleshooting customer issues and in determining qualified job candidates for the team.

Account Support Engineer: This was the position I was originally hired for. This position was centered around being intimately familiar with a select list of clients to provide specialized support. Due to general need for talents across customers and support scalability requirements, position was later generalized to that of the Operations Engineer role.

Professional Services Engineer:Was an early member of the newly-created professional services arm of Network Appliance. Was tasked with providing a range of services to the Network Appliance customer community. Services included:

• Provide network consultation, analysis and architecture services;
• Perform system installation, upgrade, repair and optimization optimization of installed storage systems and attached hosts;
• Provide pre-sales support on an as-needed basis.

Technical Analyst (Americas Group):Hired to act as a senior, continent-level field engineer to provide hardware and software support to local and regional field engineers. Typical duties included handling of problem escalations for high profile clients and implementation and technical dissemination of new technologies to field support organizations. Position required me to have demonstrable expertise in almost the entire SGI product line, particularly high end systems.

• Participated in the alpha-test program for IRIX 6.5. Program required crash analysis, bug identification and code-fix recommendations;
>Participated in the IRIX 6.5 ?early adoption? deployment program for early adopters. Program required installation and field-debugging of issues that arose related to specific OS implementations on various hardware platforms. Largest customer deployed on a 5000+ CPU array of 64-,128- and 256-processor systems;
• Provided five months of escalation duties for a large ISP. Customer was having ?twilight hang? issues in their mail environment. Customer mail environment provided mail and news services to several million subscribers and was experiencing intermittent system hangs on new and recently updated hardware;
• Helped with the introduction and initial deployments of the HIPPI technology and bulk data mover projects for customers with high I/O needs;
• Provided systems integration work between legacy Cray super computers and new, SGI server lines (Challenge and Origin 2000 series systems);
• Assisted IRIX user community by porting common internet software and updates to the IRIX platform.

Regional Support Engineer/Technical Analyst: The Regional Support Engineers were eventually made Technical Analysts - I was assigned to the Americas Group. This was done to better accommodate increasing specialization of the previously Regional Engineers. Assignments changed from primarily Atlantic region to all of US, Canada and Mexico

Systems Administrator (III): Was charged with the installation and maintenance of a heterogeneous development environment for the Applications and Web Hosting Development groups. Platforms include SGI Indy workstations and Challenge servers, Sun SPARCStation 20's and SPARCServer 1000's, Microsoft NT workstations and Power Macintosh workstations, and network peripherals (color and b&w printers, scanners, RAIDS and tape backup systems.) Network software includes: Samba and Xinet products (for integration of NT and Macintosh resources); Netscape and Apache HTTPd's; NIS and NFS for sharing of Unix resources among servers and workstations; Sendmail and Popper to provide work group Internet mail functionality; DNS services; Development software installed includes: SGI and Sun C/C++ visual developer products; SGI's Cosmo suite; Alias/Wavefront's WebAnimator. General administrative tools include: Sun's Admintool for Solaris; SGI's workstation administration tools; Veritas's and SGI's Logical Volume Management systems (VxFS/VxVM and XLV, respectively) Netscape AdmServ for management of Netscape WebServer; HP JetAdmin and Unix lpadmin for creation and maintenance of Solaris, network print server; personally created administrative tools.

Systems Design: Originally hired to act as internal consultant. Primary duties included research for product acquisition, technical consultation on acquisition contract talks and internal product development.

LAN Administration: Provided LAN administration services to several clients. Administered Novell, Banyan Vines, AppleTalk and Windows for Workgroup based LANs. Administered a LAN attached to a centrally administered WAN. Performed software installs, upgrades and configuration. Installed, configured and serviced LAN attached hardware. Performed daily backups. Acted as service liaison between local office personnel and corporate IT groups. Created a security policy draft for protection of IT assets. Handled pricing and ordering of supplies.

Technical Support: Worked on telephone help desks to provide customer assistance and instruction, trouble ticket routing and technician dispatch services.

PDN Monitoring: Worked for an international long distance voice/data carrier to monitor the functioning of their X.25 and X.400 international data networks.

Desktop Support: Provided software support, including installation and upgrade services for several clients' helpdesk operations.

Data Recovery: Recovered SAS data files lost when filesystem was damaged during a client's operating system upgrade.

Telephone Assistance: Set up and configured a dBase call tracking database to handle logging and directing of client inquiries. Helped to troubleshoot problems and teach users more powerful uses of Macintosh, DOS and Windows programs.

Desktop Publishing: Provided contract support for FAA and US Army by helping edit and prepare text and graphics for computer networking proposals.