A professional site
I first got on the Internet in 1993. I make the joke that there wasn’t much on there back then, just Tim Berners-Lee reciting the alphabet over and over again, and archie. Then Yahoo and Lycos came along, and since then, I’ve seen my wildest dreams, of online banking, talking to all my friends, and videos of cats in boxes, all come true. This is my professional site though, so no cats here.
What Drives Me
I like people to be happy with what I’ve built. When I worked in Higher Education IT, I never wanted to be responsible for something the students were moaning about. I want to build systems that work, and that make people step back in admiration, not fear. And I want to do it as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. I want it all – fast, cheap and good. I think I’ve had good luck with that too.
I was the Faculty IT Manager for Arts at UWA, and had a 21 person team, responsible for servers, helpdesk, and MultiMedia Teaching. Over the years I’ve helped many organizations set IT strategy, and then deliver on it.
Storage
I have recently moved back to Perth, Australia, after 4 years as the Storage Practice lead in BC for a System Integration company, doing migration and implementation projects for some really interesting customers, using NetApp, EMC VNX, Isilon, Dell and IBM Storage. I live, eat and breathe hard drives, SSDs, storage protocols and zero and minimal downtime implementation projects. As of 2017, I am working for a large data management company, as the Perth outpost of their concierge service offering, but my posts and tweets don’t speak for them.
I am a Netapp Certified Implementation Engineer (NCIE) for both their classic 7-Mode systems, and their new and cool Clustered ONTAP systems. I’ve also done implementation and management of EMC VNX and Isilon environments, Dell Equallogic and PowerVault, Sun StorageTek, and DAS from more people than I remember. I do Fibre Channel networks, as well as NFS, iSCSI and CIFS/SMB. I know more than I should about EXT3, NTFS, FAT32 and HFS+.
Networking
I have been running computer networks of all sizes, since 1994. I was responsible for network administration in various parts of The University of Western Australiabetween 2001 and 2009, helping to run their core and edge networks, with a time focused on firewall integration. I can speak DNS, DHCP, NTP, SMTP, HTTP, CDP, VTP and IRC at raw protocol level. Lately I’ve been doing fun stuff with low latency and high performance 10GbE DCBX networking for storage systems.
Between small, coax IPX networks, to Cisco Catalyst 6509s running central routing for 30,000 node networks, I’ve had my hands in many pies. Recently I’ve done a lot of work with Brocade, Cisco Nexus, and Dell networking. I’ve had dreams about LACP and layer 2 broadcast domains.
The Cloud
I’ve helped many organizations find their own vision of “the cloud” and helped them bring it to fruition. I worked at the University of British Columbia between 2009 and 2012, and helped them scale from 300 to 1800 virtual servers and desktops. I have been using vmware since 2001, and am a VMware Certified Professional (VCP5-DCV). I also do a lot of server installs and upgrades.
Other Geekness
I’m a true OS and Hardware geek. I’ve used everything from Windows 3.0 to Windows Server 2012, FreeBSD to all flavours of Linux. I’ve setup Active Directory and Kerberos on Mac OSX Systems (and use them at home and work), and looked after Solaris, and IRIX machines at various points in my career. They all have a place, and I’m pretty agnostic on the subject of what OS to use. I fix computers and electronics for fun, as well as hacking away with Arduino and Beaglebone microcontrollers.
As well as my hard core geek interests, I also know a fair bit about pre-press, and have been using Photoshop since about 1994. I’m also interested in photography, and am on to digital camera number 6 since 1998, a Canon T4i. I also loved photography in high school, with SLR Pentax K1000 cameras. I have pictures up on flickr
Contact
Email is best – “me@” this domain will work.