RESUME
Noel Milton Vega
Rensselaer Technology Group, LTD.
For contact info visit:
http://info.ComputingArchitects.com
IMPORTANT: Visit http://info.ComputingArchitects.com for my complete professional background.
OBJECTIVE: A position to lead/mentor technical professionals that can benefit from my years of horizontally and vertically diverse experience that includes the full
cycle tasks of conceiving; architecting; hands-on implementing; and finally documenting enterprise class solutions based on OPEN SYSTEMS
technologies. Corporations retain me to co-design the technical foundation of newly formed business units (which System admins later administer).
EDUCATION: - Masters Degree /Electrical &
Computer Engineering,
- Bachelors Degree
/Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI),
- High School / Honors Valedictorian, George Westinghouse H.S. NYC, NY, 1985
- U.S. Government Secret Clearance (inactive since 1991)
- Incredible amounts invested in continual diverse self education (books; equipment; reading; experimentation; etc).
15+ years in the computing industry working on diverse problems ( see: http://info.ComputingArchitects.Com )
OPEN SYSTEMS VENDOR PRODUCT EXPERIENCE:
Sun
/ SOLARIS / SPARC / X86; Veritas; EMC;
LANGUAGES: Unix utilities (ksh, sed, awk), C, Assembler
O/S: Sun SOLARIS 2.x; Linux (Kernel 2.4, 2.6 built from scratch versus a particular distrubution).
SUN PRODUCTS:
Solaris Volume Manager, IP Multipathing,
Sun Enterprise Volume Manager,
Solstice HA, Raid Manager 6, MPXIO Traffic Manager, etc.
Sun Cluster 3.2
Storage Array, Strorage Management Software & Storage Networking PRODUCTS:
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).
Cisco MDS9506 Directors
Brocade
McData ES3232
SANavigator 4.x, SANPilot
Clariion Navisphere 6.x
VERITAS PRODUCTS:
Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM)
Veritas FileSystem (VxFS)
Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR)
Veritas FirstWatch HA (VxFW)
Veritas Cluster Server (VCS)
Veritas Quick I/O for databases
HDS PRODUCTS:
Remote Console, HORCM CCI Command Line Interface,
SVP (
configuration software), SANtinel (Lun Masking), TrueCopy,
SYSTEMS ADMIN:
NFS, NIS, DNS, Jumpstart, TCP/IP, ufsdump, rdist, account admin, Patch & Package administration, Solaris Package creation, SSH, XNTP, Squid Proxy Server, Scripting, etc.
HARDWARE: 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 2/3000, 8730 & 8430 series, EC1000/ED1032, Connectrix(McData) Switches, DS16M McDATA Switch, DS16B Brocade Switch,
Celerra File Servers,
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 BACKGROUND:
Sept 2007 - Present – Part time Consultant to NetApp (Network Appliance); and Part time Cloud Computing
Consultant
I extend 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.
I work with clients to
build Unix 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.
Sept 2006 – Sept 2007 SAIC / City of
OpenSystems Infrastructure Design Architect (Consultant)
Storage, Storage
Networking, and Sun/Solaris Engineer designing and implementing the
infrastructure for
The project objective is to implement a web-based application that will be used by employees of New York City’s 129+ agencies to enter in hours worked, vacation time, etc. The CityTime infrastructure will replace numerous older mechanisms for entering and tracking such data, with a central modern system, making the process more cost effective and forecast budgeting easier. Technologies include, SunCluster 3.2; VCS 4.x; EMC Symmetrix; Clariion CX300; IBM application server products (MQueue; WebSeal; WebSphere; TIM/TAM), etc.
Sept 2005 – August 2006 INET (InetATS ECN)/NASDAQ,
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.
By necessity, the INET-based platform is dynamic (say, to enhance internal back-end robustness; to expand customer facing functionality; to comply with regulatory entities; to handle ever increasing volume; to reduce latencies and increase response times etc.). Therefore it is a system that is constantly researched and augmented by the small team of engineers that work on it. My role on this team included:
· Instrumentation to measure/identify/improve end-to-end UDP broadcast latencies throughout the platform (including use of network taps, the sock/iperf/netperf/tcpdump/ ethereal utilities, etc.).
· Developed programs in C to: connect to a network interface (typically ethX but not necessarily) to watch-for/sense missed packets in the sequenced UDP broadcast stream; to implement a client/server application which provided out-of-band control of servers in the core ECN network.
· Designed and implemented a SAN using Qlogic SB5202 FC switches, and Nstor/Xyratex 4900 series fibre channel arrays. The SAN stores (among other things) historical data concerning transactions that have occurred on the core ECN.
· Undertook a project to design an environment capable of creating tiny embedded forms of the Solaris and Linux O/S with specific attributes such as: kernel versions; compile options; kernel subsystems to include/exclude; versions of glibc to compile against. Although the initial version of this environment would produce kernel and ramdisk images that could be embedded in the core grid of x86 based systems (via pxe & dhcp), the design would also be extendible to specialized hardware boards based on RISC/ARM and other processors. The idea for the latter is to produce tiny java network engines capable of handling closely spaced UDP packets, and to eliminate overhead associated with generic stock x86 hardware (such as interrupts).
As part of this design, I had to work on a platform that allowed hundreds of 1U servers (i.e. embedded x86 targets) to PXE/DHCP/TFTP boot tiny of custom appliance versions of Solaris or Linux over the network. Anytime a machine was rebooted, its O/S would be completely rebuilt from scratch, and is one reason the O/S’s was kept very tiny (appliance like). From start (boot) to finish (running), it took about 70 seconds to build a machine. To do this, in Linux ttylinux was used as a base, then stripping and adding files to that filesystem as needed, along with the addition of a kernel and ramdisk, created the final version; and for Solaris I used the x86.miniroot ramdisk filesystem and kernel, which I opened up (via a lofiadm mounts) and similarly customized it by stripping and adding what I needed. In both cases, the design of the O/S was such that its application function (let’s say a UDP packet re-request server) was not hard coded into it, but rather was designed so that a boot script would, based on a configuration file it would FTP over (via wget), dynamically customize the server’s personality at boot-time. It was very scalable.
· Migrated the InetATS DR site from
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.
· EMC Engineer (EMC residency program) - retained in a consultant capacity to assist their customer, Rainbow Media (a division of Cablevision in Jericho, N.Y.) to provision storage in a EMC Symmetrix 8430 and ED-1032 Connectrix based SAN environment.
· Technical authoring of Business Continuance processes, High Availability best practice guides, and step-by-step HOW-TOs for various clients of Sun Microsystems. A small sampling of the many documents I have written over the years for clients, and for myself, can be viewed at the following online address: http://info.ComputingArchitects.Com
Oct 2002 - June 2004 The
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). NOTE: Other than my own, no vendor or third party
professional services were used in any of the work about 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
· Successfully designed/specked out/purchased/installed/configured the following: (1) Took two unused Hitachi HDS9960s, moved one to a DR site, and got TrueCopy working between the two via direct FC-AL over two DWDM lines. This step included upgrading HDS microcode, provisioning disks via the SVP and Remote Console, creating an RCU, ensuring different DWDM paths etc. (2) Based on the distance between the two sites, calculated the BB & EE CREDIT requirements and procured and configured 4 McData ES3232 switches (a redundant pair for each site); through a pair of local ISLs between the two switches at the same site, and pairs of DWDM ISLs between the two sites, converted FC traffic from just TrueCopy traffic over DWDM to general FibreChannel SAN traffic over DWDM (which included TrueCopy traffic) (3) Purchased Hitachi SANtinel licenses for Lun Masking (4) as the first clients of the SAN, created a mission critical VCS 3.5MP2 cluster (for a mission Critical Oracle Database) on at one site, and synchronously TrueCopy replicated the data to the DR site. Other accomplishments included creating specialized High Availability storage solutions using multi-initiator configurations using the D2 StorEdge array; configured Squid Proxy servers; and other Sun/Solaris architectures/implementations.
Jan 2001 - Sep 2002
Cablevision Inc., Hicksville,
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.
· Designed and built highly available HA clusters based on Veritas VCS and various other availability technologies and best practices (PowerPath/JNI/Qlogic, DMP, IP multipathing, mirroring, load balancing through Resonate etc);
· Designed and coded a black box engine that sits on top of Sun's jumpstart product that eliminates all of the traditional shortcomings of jumpstart and makes it enterprise scalable. I evaluated and installed the new SunFire 6800, 4800, 3800 products; the evaluation included creating single and dual partitions and the domains within them using the System Controller Console and Domain Console CLI; physically adding and removing components like CPU/Memory, Interface Boards, PCI cards in one domain to verify the isolation in other domains; flash upgraded the 6800 & 3800 firmware; extensive load testing including designing and creating a platform for Oracle 8.1.7/9i Parallel Server testing on EMC storage. Essentially, I designed and physically implemented (always with an enterprise and scalable mentality) anything to do with the back end (Head End) computing infrastructures; it will ultimately service up to several million households in the New York Tri-State area.
Aug
1999 - Dec 2000 Mail.COM Inc.,
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.
· On the SAN side of the design, considerations such
as redundancy and resiliency were made possible through multiple active (Power)
Paths across different Fibre Channel switches, JNI
HBA boards across different Sun I/O boards, VxFS for
quick filesystem recovery, and VxVM
mirrored O/S and SWAP volumes. High availability considerations were
accomplished through the configuration of an additional UE6500 with visibility
to the entire SAN storage pool via Fibre Channel
zoning and Volume Logix HBA to FA hypervolume
authentication. In this configuration, the UE6500 can assume the compute task
of any of the other
· On the NAS side of the configuration, multiple NFS volumes are hosted by multiple EMC Celerra File Servers. Performance and availability design consideration were accomplished through the combination of 2 to 1 active/passive data mover failover configurations, redundant 100Mbit ethernet links across different datamover NIC cards and Cisco switches, etc.
· Based on Sun’s Jumpstart model, engineered a method
for jumpstarting machines on Mail.COM’s global
networks, without the need to configure jumpstart or even boot servers on
remote segments. Traditional jumpstart environments minimally require a boot
server on each client network segment. A result of this Light Weight Jumpstart
Server design is that network segments no longer require (and in fact are
prohibited from having) their own boot, configuration, and install servers. The
configuration, install and boot server for all of global Mail.COM exists, and
is maintained, in one location (
Oct 1998 - Aug
1999 Chase Manhattan Bank H.Q.,
Global Systems Solaris/Unix Design Engineer (Consultant)
· As a member of a three person 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.,
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):
· For Alliance Capital Management Corp, I built an environment consisting of UEx00 enterprise servers with RSM-219s and EMC storage for a y2k testing lab. Technologies included Symmetrix 3830, PowerPath, Veritas Volume Manager, etc. Wrote a C program that allows any user on a system to have independent control and view of the date & time without altering the UNIX system (kernel) date & time. This ability to change the date/time anywhere in the range "01/01/1970 00:00:00: - 01/19/2038 03:14:07" at the user shell level meant that multiple developers could test for Year 2000 compliance, each with a view of their own time (within their UNIX shell), without disturbing the REAL master system time.
· For Olsten Staffing Corporate HQ, as the SINGLE systems architect and integrator, I deployed a Sun/EMC Enterprise-based infrastructure for year 2000 efforts. The hardware I configured are: ten E6000s, one E5000, one E4000, three RSM2000s, two Ultra2s, Sun to EMC connectivity (2.9 TeraBytes over two Symmetrix Storage Units: 3700 and 5700 models). With this equipment I have built from the ground up the following configurations:
o Four E6000 HA Clusters (pairs) using Vertias FirstWatch HA and shared EMC storage over Ultra Wide Differential SCSI interfaces; configured carefully designed striped volumes using Veritas Volume manager and Veritas Filesystems to work optimally with Oracle 7.3.3 and 8; wrote supplement programs to the Veritas Oracle Agent API to start/stop the TNS listener during failover and to start/stop the HA monitoring of Oracle for DBA use when performing database maintenance. Configured dual ATM interfaces to support LECS and LanEmulation protocol for IP support over the ATM fabric. Configured an RSM2000 and associated LUNS on a E6000 on one of the HA pairs for private disk storage. This cluster doubles as a Load Test Generator (Load Runner) / Oracle Test Database pair. The extra RSM200 added the complexity of managing different disk controller and minor device numbers between the two machines when using Veritas Quick I/O for databases.
o 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.
o An E6000/RSM2000 and E4000/RSM2000. Created both RAID5 and RAID 0+1 striped LUNS for use with Oracle and for Print spooling.
o
Configured redundant Ultra2 pairs to
serve corporate-wide DNS name services, home directories and standard
application repositories (for automount), rdist distribution services to the
o Installed Oracle 7.3.3 and created a basic database. With input from DBAs, created optimal database environments: in /etc/system, tune MINFREE and LOTSFREE kernel variables, exclude unnecessary modules from being loaded, set SCSI options for optimal disk I/O, create UFS and VXFS filesystems with appropriate block sizes.
o Install, debug, configure and/or design the following UNIX based subsystems: installed and configured Solaris O/S, 10/100 BaseT & ATM Classical IP and LanEmulation based TCP/IP networks, RAID Volumes on Storage Array Disks using DiskSuite or Veritas, in memory tmpfs based filesystems, NIS and NFS services, Scripted backup schemes, User Accounts, Automatic Installation via JumpStart, Network Terminal Servers, Configured departmental intranets with HTTP and FTP services, Basic firewall with FireWall-1, High Availability Servers for NFS and Oracle Database & TNS Listener processes.
· For Mayer & Schweitzers Inc., I created the custom JumpStart server used to build their 100 position UltraSparc based trading desks.
Mar 1994 - Apr
1995 THE SUMITOMO BANK, LTD., (1)
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
· Supported non-UNIX-based market data products
including Reuters Dealing/2000 foreign exchange system,
Feb 1993 - Mar
1994 IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEMS (IPS),
Project Engineer/Supervisor/Developer
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.
· Wrote FirmWare in C to interface a UNIX serial port to a receiver board used in RCA's DirectTV development project. The interface provided the means by which to transfer test vector information to and from the embedded system under test.
· Developed C programs to predict the behavior of hardware being developed for a new broadcast system (DirecTV) designed to transmit several programs over a single satellite channel using MPEG compression techniques.
May 1991-Sep.
1991 SARNOFF RESEARCH (RCA) LABS,
May 1990 - Jun 1991 GENERAL
ELECTRIC,
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.
· Secret Clearance (no longer active)