Rensselaer Technology Group, Ltd.
http://info.ComputingArchitects.Com
108 East 96th. Street Phone: 212-699-2660
New York, N.Y. 10128 eMail: nmvega@ComputingArchitects.Com
CURRENT OBJECTIVE(S):
Seeking an opportunity as technology manager/director in leadership roles that leverage my years of core enterprise architecture-design-and-implementation experience. Roles may include full-cycle conception and steering of enterprise projects, QA, or operational efforts; Technical/Architectural strategy development; Development/Documention of processes, procedures, and guidelines; Vendor interaction; Instruction and education; And where necessary, use of my technical experience to hands-on contribute directly. All of these are designed to leverage 20+ years of hands-on deep experience in new, more strategic ways.
FORMAL, CONTINUING, & SELF EDUCATION (RE-EDUCATION):
- 1993 MS Electrical & Computer Engineering, Boston University, Boston MA
- 1989 BS Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY
- 1985 High School / Honors Valedictorian, George Westinghouse H.S., NYC, NY
- 2010 Certificate in JAVA Programming, New York University (NYU) , NYC, NY
- 2010 New York University (NYU) School of Continuing Professional Studies, NYC, NY (on going)
- Continuous time & money invested in the reading of both Technical and IT-Project Managerial literature in my personal book library
(click HERE to see snapshot picture of book in the evolving bookshelf).
Former U.S. Government Secret Clearance while at GE Aerospace defence (expired in 1991)
Circa 1990: Started out as a communications protocol sonar engineer for GE Aerospace defense; then Electronics-board/ASIC designer for the RCA Labs DirectTV design team (both high-end Electrical Engineer roles).
Circa 1993: Recognizing that both U.S. electronics manufacturing and also defence budgets were in decline, pivoted my career to Open Systems administration.
Circa 1995: Evolved my career from administration to Open Systems Computing Architecture & Implementation consulting: Working as a Compute & Storage Solutions Architect for Sun Microsystems, full-cycle designed/architected and implemented large-scale mission critical infrastructures for it's enterprise level clients (... in financial; telecom; health; and media markets). Subsequently departed Sun Microsystems to found Rensselaer Technology Group in 1998, to independently expand on this role. Now, having to contract and engage with businesses directly, took active roles in the prerequisite identification of functional requirements across business lines, which then led to architecting and implementing open systems technical solutions to them.
More recent years: in a 50%/50% strategic-to-tactical split, businesses leverage both the technical diversity and the multi-corporate exposure accumulated in my background, to assist their particular strategic goals; trend identification needs; and other technically related business considerations. Drawing on select experiences at Network Appliance; the NASDAQ stock exchange; The New York Mercantile Exchange; and Cablevision, the below endeavours to illustrate how, in the performance of duties as full-cycle computing architect to management/leadership, I worked with stake-holders to: Identify functional business requirements (as distinct from subsequent technical designs to satisfy them); Help manage supplier and vendor relationships; Designed, socialized, and implemented critical Business Continuity and DR infrastructures; Assisted with budgeting and forecasting; Authored and socialized policy, procedure, and process documents; And managed day-to-day ops personnel (in the transitioning something I built).
NOTE ON TECHNICAL AUTHORING:
Along the way in my career, I've authored many professional documents (White papers; Lab manuals; Executive Summaries; Project Scope and Vision documents; Step by step How-to's; Guides; Visios; Operations/run-book documents; Policy & Procedure documents; QA scenario testing, etc.).
Beginning with my work as Electrical engineer at GE Aerospace NAVY defense and at RCA's DirectTV labs, documented multiple engineering documents. Continued to do the same for Sun Microsystems (for Sun PS clients, and Sun's Education division), and subsequently also for EMC, Veritas Inc, NASDAQ, etc.; As well as also write for those companies clients, as well as for my own clients. Partial/unfinished versions (for confidentiality reasons) of some white-paper type documents I've authored can be found at the following URL: http://info.ComputingArchitects.com. Note that finished/polished versions are not available on that site due to copyright/ownership considerations.
EXPERIENCE: OPEN SYSTEMS ENTERPRISE COMPUTE & STORAGE/INFORMATION, AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
VENDOR PRODUCTS: CONFIGURED & USED IN THE ARCHITECTING OF ENTERPRISE PLATFORMS (PAST & PRESENT):
SUN Microsystems / Solaris:
- Solaris / OpenSolaris features
- Solaris Volume Manager,
- IP Multipathing,
- Sun Enterprise Volume Manager,
- Raid Manager 6
- MPXIO Traffic Manager
- Solstice HA / Sun Cluster 3.x
- ZFS & Zones (Containers
- Solaris XEN
- and more (truncated for brevity).
LINUX (Distribution neutral built from scratch for embedded compute systems):
- Linux (A 2.4 or 2.6 kernel; A tiny filesystem; and a RAM disk)
- Busybox
- Ttylinux
- XEN Virtualization
EMC:
- Symmetrix / Symmetrix DMX
- Celerra
- Clarrion
- Clariion Navisphere 6.x
- EMC Control Center (ECC 6.x)
- SymCLI/Solutions Enabler: symmir; symconfigure; symmask; symdev; symoptmz; etc.
- Celerra: NAS Command Line Interface
- Connectrix SAN Directors and switches
- FibreZone for Solaris (FibreZone & Volume Logix – fzone; fpath; symmask; symmaskdb)
- Volume Logix / Symmask(db) (HBA Symmetrix Hypervolume Access Security)
- Power Path for Solaris (for mutipath redundancy & load balance).
- and more (truncated for brevity).
BROCADE / CISCO / McDATA:
- Cisco MDSxxx FibreChannel Directors
- Brocade Silkworm line; 12xxx, 48xxx Directors; and Multi-protocol routers/gateways
- McData Spherion ES3232; and Directors
- SANavigator 4.x, SANPilot, and other management tools.
- Nishan IPS3000 SoIP (Storage over IP)
- ISL's, IFL's, Trunking
VERITAS:
- Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM)
- Veritas FileSystem (VxFS)
- Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR)
- Veritas Cluster Server (VCS)
- Veritas Quick I/O for databases
- Veritas FirstWatch HA (VxFW)
Hitachi HDS PRODUCTS:
- Hitachi HDS9960/70/80/90
- Remote Console
- Hi Command
- HORCM CCI Command Line Interface
- SVP (Hitachi array configuration software)
- SANtinel (Lun Masking)
- TrueCopy
LANGUAGES: Unix scripting utilities (ksh/sh/bash, sed, awk, & piped unix commands), C, Assembler, PERL, Java
CORE OS SYSTEMS ADMIN:
NFS, NIS, DNS, Jumpstart, TCP/IP, ufsdump, rdist, rsync, account admin, patch & package administration, Solaris Package creation, SSH, XNTP, Squid Proxy Server, Scripting, etc. (and much more -- truncated for brevity).
HARDWARE SYSTEMS (truncated version for brevity):
UltraSparc 1, 2, 5, 10, 60 Desktops
Ultra Enterprise Servers 3/4/5/6500
Sun Fire Enterprise Servers 420, v480, v880, 3800, 4800, 4810, 6800
Sun Storage: RSM2000, D1000’s, A1000’s, A5000’s, T3+
Digi CM16/32 Console Servers
EMC Symmetrix: DMX, 8730 & 8430 series, EC1000/ED1032, Connectrix(McData) Switches, DS16M McDATA Switch, DS16B Brocade Switch, Celerra File Servers, Enterprise Storage & Solutions (SRDF, TimeFinder, SymmOptimizer, SDR, etc), JNI/Qlogic/Emulex fibre boards and configuration, Clariion Storage, ECC 5.x, Hitachi HDS9960/70,
Spherion McData ES3232 Fibre Channel Switch, Brocade 3800 FC Switches, Adva FSP-3000 DWDM, nStor/Xyratex 49xxx Fibre Channel & 52xxx SATA based storage arrays, Qlogic SB5202 Stackable FC Switches; Cisco MD-S9506 Directors
PROFESSIONAL WORK EXPERIENCE:
Sept 2007 - PRESENT - DataCenter Cloud Computing Architect to various clients.
Work with clients to strategically/architecturally re-design their IN-HOUSE datacenters in phases to abstract interfaces to compute, storage, network connectivity, and application resources, so that consumption those resources are uniform and scalable to consumers of them (in other words, make the resources cloudy). Strategies include, compute, storage, IP virtualization technologies, as well as application interface virtualization via RESTful/QUERY interfaces, and more.
Work with clients to build open-systems based Cloud HOSTED infrastructures to (1) host previously in-house run applications on Cloud provider systems, (2) to setup compute and storage Cloud entities to test applications on variously sized platforms to assist in the right sized purchase of new equipment, (3) to setup compute and storage Cloud entities to load test applications before they are put into in-house production. The Cloud provider, for now, is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which consists of their EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB (or MySql if they prefer) products. Tasks may include creating a special DMZ/Bastion security group to allow SSH from the public internet; creating special load balancer AMI instances do distribute load among back-end servers; creating isolated security groups that allow only specific traffic between that and other security groups; ensuring data backup between High Availability Zones; creating custom AMI’s; etc.
Most recently designed a Cloud solution that would enable NetApp to provide a utility-based hosted storage service to it's customers. A link to an early concept version of the unofficial design I presented to NetApp management is here: http://www.computingarchitects.com/ReplicationCloudDesign.pdf
Extended NetApp’s basic enterprise monitoring platform (known as Operations Manager (OM) / Distributed Fabric Manager (DFM)), by writing code to (1) tap into enterprise events generated by this products and, where necessary, invoke customized hands-off corrective action (such as just-in-time growing a volume that has reached capacity) and (2) use DFM as a gateway/portal into the NetApp ONTAP enterprise, to generate custom dashboards (in HTML or CSV format) to report the health of an entire NetApp enterprise. I also perform heterogeneous migrations for their customers using tools like SecureCopy, Beyond Compare, Rsync, etc. to NetApp filers (Storage Controllers) from competitor storage platforms.
Sept 2006 – Sept 2007 SAIC / City of New York, CityTime Project
OpenSystems Infrastructure Design Architect (Consultant)
Storage, Storage Networking, and Sun/Solaris Engineer designing and implementing the infrastructure for New York City’s “CityTime” project ( http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml )
Sept 2005 – August 2006 INET (InetATS ECN)/NASDAQ, New York City, N.Y.
Senior Systems Engineer
INET (formerly known as Island/InetATS and now part of NASDAQ), provides the transaction network and engine (a.k.a. ECN) that implements what is universally known as the NASDAQ stock exchange (the computing engine to which financial institutions connect to trade equities/stocks). The core of this platform consists of a grid of 1U systems running a 70mb custom Linux & JRE based O/S; and which work together through a UDP broadcast-based protocol which glues them together. One of these systems is the match engine (the single computer that interprets and handles incoming requests), and the rest are systems that implement functions and customer connectivity.
· Migrated the InetATS DR site from Secaucus, New Jersey to Ashburn, Virginia. This was quite a large project.
June 2004 – August 2005 Consultant
OpenSystems Engineer and Technical Writer for various clients
· Storage Engineer - retained in a consultant capacity to design and configure a Sun / Clariion / Brocade based SAN for Primus Financial.
Oct 2002 - June 2004 The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), Manhattan & L.I. (DR)
Senior SAN Design/Architect/Implementation/Admin Engineer (Consultant)
· Retained in a consultant capacity by NYMEX to fully design and implement a multi-site SAN (Storage Area Network). Other than my own, no vendor or third party professional services were used in any of the work to be described. Please refer to the following technical diagrams and papers, which relate to the work described below:
NYMEX Clusters and DWDM distance SAN and Buffer Credit Calculations for Distance SANs
Jan 2001 - Sep 2002 Cablevision Inc., Hicksville, Long Island
Lead Senior Sun/EMC/Veritas/Solaris Infrastructure Design Engineer (Consultant)
· Retained in a consultant capacity by Cablevision core Engineering to design and implement all aspects of the compute and storage processing infrastructure (Sun, EMC, Veritas, etc.) that represents the backbone of what will serve a projected 4 million households with a new home media service known as the iO.tv (i.e. Interactive Optimum, which is based on a digital set top box that uses http to display a scalable and remotely updatable user interface, and a cable modem to send encrypted digital video on demand, email, and other plug-in interactive services). Among other things, I designed and implemented (without EMC professional services) the EMC based SAN that services all the functions in the Master Head End datacenter (customer database, the digital movie encoders, the Conditional access smart card encryption system, set top box auto provisioning system etc). Technologies include ED1032 Connectix; 8730/8430 Symmetrixes; Fibre Zone; Volume Logix; ECC 4.3; SRDF; TimeFinder; Persistent Binding; PowerPath.
Aug 1999 - Dec 2000 Mail.COM Inc., New York, N.Y.
Lead Senior Sun/EMC/Veritas/Solaris Infrastructure Design Engineer
· Engineered, built and administered the EMC-based Storage Area Network (SAN) on which Mail.COM hosted its critical businesses: consumer, partner ISP, and business-to-business messaging (for example: Mail.com, Email.com, Iwon.com, CNN.com etc.). The design consisted of four EMC Symmetrix 3930s, two 3830s, three EMC dual director Connectrix Fibre Channel Switches, four EMC Celerra File Servers, and a dozen 28CPU Sun UEx500 Enterprise Servers. Additional components include software components such as EMC PowerPath, ECFM Connectrix Manager, Volume Logix, ECC SymCLI & OSM Manager, Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), Veritas FileSystem (VxFS), etc.
Oct 1998 - Aug 1999 Chase Manhattan Bank H.Q., New York, N.Y.
Global Systems Solaris/Unix Design Engineer (Consultant)
· As a member of a three person Unix Global Engineering team, I designed Sun Solaris-based solutions for Chase’s global business groups. Projects include the design, test and building of a Veritas FirstWatch based HA disaster recovery platform for the Chase private key infrastructure (PKI) using multiple Sun machines connected to D1000s in multi-initiator fashion; SVR4 Packaging of products to be put into Chase's engineering build of Solaris.
Apr 1995 - Oct 1998 SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC., New York, NY
UNIX/Sun Integration & Support Engineer for Sun PS
· As a senior member in the professional services division, provide technical, integration and consulting services for business clients
that use SUN Solaris/Sparc-based computer and storage networks as their enterprise-wide client/server platform. The vast number of hardware & software products and customer UNIX configurations required of me a rapid learning curve, dedication and passion for what I did. As a result, I was awarded Sun Microsystems Northeast Area's Engineer of the Year award, and became a Senior Systems Support & Professional Services Engineer within my first year at the company. Here are a few of Sun Microsystem client assignments I architected and implemented (hands on):
· Two E6000 machines using Solstice DiskSuite and shared EMC storage over Ultra Wide Differential SCSI interfaces; stripped volumes were carefully configured to work optimally with Oracle 7.3.3 and 8; dual ATM similarly configured.
· An E6000/RSM2000 and E4000/RSM2000. Created both RAID5 and RAID 0+1 striped LUNS for use with Oracle and for Print spooling.
Mar 1994 - Apr 1995 THE SUMITOMO BANK, LTD., (1) One World Trade Center, NYC
Trading Floor Systems Designer & Administrator
· Was deeply involved in the complete design and administration of a new 70 position trading floor during relocation from 1 World Trade Center to 270 Park Avenue. Relocation efforts were initiated after the WTC bombing of 1993. Responsibilities included design of a SUN-based 10baseT trading network using Sparc Server 20s and 1000s for the back-end and dual-headed Sparc 10s for the desktops. The UNIX portion of the rollout included the configuration of NIS, NFS/Automounter, OS and Application distribution via Jumpstart and/or Rdist, user account management, backup strategies. In addition to normal system Unix administration functions, supported the market data distribution platforms. This included managing UNIX platform-based data feeds from Dow Jones Telerate, Reuters, and Knight Ridder, as well as managing the market data distribution platform, the Teknekron TIB and MarketSheet products.
Feb 1993 - Mar 1994 IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEMS (IPS - a startup), New York, NY
May 1991-Sep. 1991 SARNOFF RESEARCH (RCA) LABS, Princeton, NJ
May 1992-Sep. 1992 Thesis Research & Development for Masters Degree
Software/Computer/DSP Hardware Design Engineer
· Designed and built the DSP hardware board that predicts the signal vectors (i.e. pixels position, velocity and hue) for DirectTV broadcast signals. The output vectors are used to substitute for momentary signal loss during atmospheric disturbances.
May 1990 - Jun 1991 GENERAL ELECTRIC, Syracuse, NY
Communications Engineer
· As member of a five person team, assisted in the design, coding and testing of software in 68030 assembly language and C to implement low level military protocols for the NAVY Seawolf Submarine defense project. These protocols, which provided a link between various physical listening devices on the outside of the ship and the ships main operating system include: RS-422, SCSI and NTDS (Navy Tactical Data Standards) protocols B & E.