Senior information technology manager with over 15 years of professional Internet business experience and a proven track record running a cool, calm operation in a high pressure 24-hour environment.

Employment History

• Directed a team of 11 systems engineers, architects, configuration managers, partner services manger (including service desk operations) and database administrators with 100% responsibility for remotely located 1800 sq. ft. caged data center facilities (approximately 375 devices distributed between two datacenters and a corporate office space) which serviced nearly 10 million monthly unique site visitors; over 150 million monthly page views; and 350 mbps of outbound HTTP traffic during peak times of the day (including cached delivery via CDN).
• Planned and executed major content management system migrations with minimal downtime; transferring content management and presentation from TeamSite (file system) to Escenic (database) with an atomic launch and back-out mechanism.
• Planned and executed major production system migrations and upgrades with minimal downtime, including core switch migration (from Foundry to Cisco equipment) and a Web Order Entry product migration (between hosting facilities). Collaborated with Cox Newspaper properties to ensure that these migrations completed successfully and within time lines.
• Instituted incident and problem management processes to eliminate repeat failures, speed up problem resolution and to prioritize continuous improvement.
• Planned and deployed D/R strategy leveraging existing Akamai services and engagement. Plotted out a course for continuing improvement toward ideal goals for business continuity and D/R.
• Designed, planned, budgeted and executed delivery of the "COXNet Managed Web Hosting Environment" product in order to ensure that all web hosting needs were provided for within Cox Newspapers. This was a major improvement over the previously instituted Local Programming Environment, because VMWare allowed hardware to be shared among customers with guaranteed resources.
• Trained and coached Tech Ops management staff in an ongoing career development strategy.
• Instituted internal Wiki for COXnet IT staffers in order to support growing documentation needs.

• Planned and executed major production system migrations and upgrades with near-zero downtime, including Network Appliance filers, Cisco networking equipment, PIX firewalls, BigIP, WAN/LAN T1 and Metro E circuits, Web systems running BEA Weblogic 5.0 to 7.1 to 9.1, Oracle 8 to 9i to 10g, Solaris 8 to SLES9&10 Linux migrations, and several other support systems.
• Implemented an advanced Content Delivery Network (Akamai) to improve and harden site uptime and reliability as well as to prepare our media sites to handle unexpected news-related traffic spikes.  This allowed us to serve 5x more traffic as our previous limit with no additional hardware or software in our data center and also offered full protection from denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
• Designed, developed, and deployed a Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Award winning "hot deployment" code release system to allow for unobtrusive code deployments at any hour of the day.  This allowed for 1) zero-downtime weekly code updates, 2) a near total reduction in scheduled overnight maintenance windows for daytime personnel and 3) the ability to address urgently and severely problematic issues live on our sites, any time of day.
• Designed, developed, and deployed improvements to the "hot deployment" code release system including XML-based configuration and release tracking; support for concurrent QA and UAT across multiple code releases (without additional hardware); and pre-production white-glove testing support on production hardware and with production URL structure.
• Designed, authored and deployed more granular and standardized system monitoring and metric-gathering tools to provide for long-term trend analysis to better support troubleshooting, isolation of resource contention and capacity planning.
• Designed, implemented and maintained shared Local Programming Environment web hosting infrastructure to give our newspaper brands more control of their websites and to encourage innovation.  This also lowered costs by centralizing an in-house and extensible hosting solution, versus requiring each newspaper to host with external vendors.
• Member and manager of 24/7 on call rotation, which provided 15-minute response to system or customer generated alerts.
• Designed technical interview guide for use within COXnet IT. This guide implemented Cox's core principles and documented interview policy in a structured and scripted guide. The guide provided a means to delegate technical interviews to non-managers while preserving an ethical, legal and objective means to compare candidates.

• Member of a 24/7 on-call rotation (operations).
• Provided technical support for developers and newspaper staffers (content producers).
• Performed systems administration and engineer roles on UNIX platforms.
• Performed operations role in architecting, deploying and maintaining multi-tiered J2EE environment (using apache, Weblogic and Oracle) while preserving and integrating legacy CGI functionality.
• Performed multiple migrations of services between data centers, operating systems and hardware.
• Responsible for all development, testing and production hardware capacity planning, procurement and deployment.
• Designed and implemented customized caching mechanism for web service calls to COXnet application (widgets); this greatly improved the performance and stability of web sites at a critical time.
•  Performed regular load tests to prove architectural improvements and to isolate performance bottlenecks.

• Designed, implemented, and maintained production and corporate networks to support fast paced growth.
• Led operations department role in development, design, implementation, and maintenance of a portal site that eventually generated over 600 mbps of outbound HTTP traffic during peak times of the day.
• Developed and maintained code release facility for i-drive platform code (Java) for low impact production deployment.
• Automated load balancer configuration for rapid allocation of server resources.
• Automated installation procedure for web server tier with KickStart.
• Authored many maintenance scripts for log harvesting, service administration, and system performance monitoring. 
• Designed and implemented i-drive.com's apache/JServ architecture.
• Implemented Keystone for operations department's support ticketing system.
• Graphed metrics for bandwidth, load balancing delegation, system resources, and other data with gnuplot, MRTG, cricket, and HP OpenView.
• Migrated web-tier hosts and load balancers through a progression of hardware, operating systems, kernel and patch levels; progressively enhancing performance and stability.

• Member of a 24/7 on-call rotation (operations).
• Responsible for integrating and consolidating newly acquired company services.
• Developed system monitoring tools.
• Automated system wide maintenance tasks.
• Developed solutions for collocated servers on demand.
• Responsible for provisioning, maintenance, administration, automation, configuration and monitoring of all in-house service support infrastructure (DNS, sendmail, POP, etc.) and apache web servers (serving over 100k sites and domains).
• Daily coaching and support of NOC staff.
• Provided 1st-3rd tier technical support to end-users and resellers.
• Developed administrative tools for dedicated server markets.
• Developed menu driven administrative interface for collocated UNIX server offering.
• Developed suite of DNS administration and automation tools including both command line and web interfaces.
• Developed anti-spam system requiring successful pop requests for SMTP relay authorization.
• Developed production, QA, and development release tools.
• Developed account provisioning and tech support interface for UNIX technical staff (processed account additions through a queue and permitted logged administrative access to all servers).

Awards

Newspaper Association of America press award for "Hot-deployment" code release system.

Technologies & Skill Proficiencies

Senior and technical management; monitoring and incident management; UNIX system administration and engineering; SAN and NAS administration; N-tier web hosting environment design and operation; network infrastructure design and operation, PERL, PHP, HTML/CSS/XML/XSL/Javascript/AJAX, advanced Solaris/Linux/HP-UX Systems Administration, BEA Weblogic Platform with Portal and Integration, Jboss/Tomcat, Oracle 9i & 10g RAC/MySQL/Caché, Computer Network and Web Application Security, Interwoven TeamSite, Apache, CVS/RCS, SSL, Netbackup, DNS; data center facility management; and ITIL (v3) Foundations certification.

Education

References