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Solutions Lead within the Corporate Shared Services division of Serco, leading the technical team through define, design, build and implement phases of large transformation programmes of the infrastructure and services supporting Serco’s business. Ensuring all new services adhere to the wider company IT strategies and roadmaps. Working closely with business leads to ensure solutions are meeting industry leading security standards and ensure data safety. Lead to successful delivery of the following projects:

• SAP HR: Upgrade and migration of finance and HR SAP to SaaS SAP service (SAP HR and PI)
• RBAC: Implement new RBAC solution based on the Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) service to synchronise access management across all services within Serco including SAP HCM, corporate directory, Azure and Azure Active Directory. Lead Architect for the full lifecycle of the project from vendor selection to BAU handover. Solution included Software IDM management layer to integrate RBAC into ServiceNow and other web services
• Payroll Finance: Migrate Payroll service from on-premise to private SaaS offering from Zellis/NGA and transition all current integration paths
• SAP Finance: Design and deploy new SAP Concur expense management system
• SIEM: Re-tooling from legacy ArcSight/LogRhythm on to new SyslogNG environment for server, network and EUD security logging
• SIEM: Introduce network monitoring using DarkDrace

Accountable for the base line and target infrastructure architecture definition and strategy. This includes the creation, management and socialisation of technology standards and reference artefacts within IS and the broader business community, and ensuring alignment to Group technology policies. Identify and analyse business needs and drivers associated with infrastructure change, assessing their feasibility and proposing solution options; carry out options analysis to evaluate the technology impact as well as the cost, risks, benefits and support implications of each option. Sainsbury’s are embarking on a Group wide transformation into the Azure Cloud utilising the Agile methodology.

Senior Solution Architect supporting the corporate arm of Jaguar Land Rover modernise and migrate their on-premise HR and Payroll environments into strategic SaaS Cloud providers (Specialist HR Cloud). The project has two key deliverables, to transform the soon to be out of support legacy systems to the latest global standards and then migrate the entire solution to the SaaS Cloud service providers.

Senior architect during a global data centre transformation and closure programme, given the task of closing a commercially unviable data centre located within Krefeld (Germany) into HPE’s strategic site in Frankfurt. To lead commercial model, design and sizing of the new DC solution and define architectural standards based on HPE’s offerings and services. Interface with CEO level management of the HPE customer base currently hosted by the legacy DC to build commercial agreements for the future mode of operation as well as the transitional phase. Engage with both internal and external service providers to plan and negotiate the migration costing’s adhering to both the global DCT funding rules and limitations set by the individual customers.

Working within a dynamic Bank IT department this role is responsible for the design of infrastructure solutions, IT services and cost estimates on the Co-Operative Bank technology projects in line with the IT strategy & Architecture principles. Acting as primary point of contact for the business customer, stakeholders and external vendors to ensure the smooth design, planning and implementation of the projects. To lead infrastructure design of various technologies such as networks, server infrastructure, application and storage. Taking complex ideas, objectives or problems to work them through to simple solutions.
Lead architect for a number of projects including:

• Upgrade of the banking mainframe to adhere to new Government Guarantee Scheme, including bank marketing and customer facing statements/letters
• Complete IT and business process outsource of all HR and Payroll functions for the bank to HR Cloud Services provider
• Upgrade and virtualisation of the IT security management software (Physical to virtual migration)
• Introduction of Cash and Cheque Deposit at ATM to the bank
• Upgrade of all perimeter firewalls to enable increased security protocols

Lead Architect within a commercial savings project between HP and Rolls Royce with the sole remit of reducing the IT costs for Rolls Royce by 10% (£1M+). Given the authority to question every part of the partnership from vendor choice/negotiations, staffing numbers and location, business requirements and processes. Outcome of this project has been a set of initiatives ranging from adjusting technical functionality to match business requirements, offshoring and third party contract savings. In total a saving of 34% per annum has been recommended with 13% achieved to date, the recommended initiatives continue to roll out.

Managing the provision and day to day running of a large team of backup and storage experts to support the established HP team on the Rolls Royce account. Managing the conduct of a detailed technical and operational data protection assessment of the current service and provide a set of recommendations rated by risk, benefit and effort. Other work packages of this project included staff augmentation, operational assistance and providing a strategic roadmap to HP/Roll Royce project.

Technical architect managing the safe migration and removal of IT services during a large datacentre closure. Concentrating on the Dev and Test environments consisting of over 300 servers together with the associated networking and storage hardware. Talking to key stake holders and service managers to plan around software releases and testing schedules.

Lead Architect during a huge two stage migration.

• Phase one to migrate from 100+ legacy McData switches onto a network of Brocade DCX fabric switches, a total of 6000 active fibres ports in scope.
• Phase two to migrate 1200TB of data from the Barclays legacy storage environment including old Hitachi, EMC and IBM arrays onto new IBM SVC, IBM XIV and EMC VMAX. SVC ImageMode, XIV DataMigration and EMC OpenReplicator are used as migration tools.

Assisting and advising Cap Gemini on a large multi data centre storage/SAN migration and transformation. Although this entire project is outsourced to the vendor, the Cap Gemini board required a Technical Design Advisor within their own team to ensure the vendor followed best practice throughout the programme and to ensure the migration approach was meeting the SLA’s Cap Gemini have with their clients. Migration in excess of 20 source targets arrays ranging from Clariion CX3 to Symmetrix DMX4 with connectivity provided by Cisco SAN, onto 6 new VMAX arrays with virtualised fabrics on Brocade DCX.​

Joined the Data Centre Transformation Programme to successfully design, build, test and document the new Global Storage Platform utilising the EMC VMAX storage array. Provide the necessary training and documentation to the Operations Team for a seamless hand over. New hardware includes five EMC VMAX storage arrays spilt across multiple sites with replication and a Brocade DCX fibre network running virtualised fabrics. Install and configure resilient management tool sets for both these technologies.​​

Providing consultancy and level three support to Citibank during a large scale migration from the Legacy Legato environment onto seven new NetWorker datazones. New infrastructure includes NetWorker version 7.4, 6 EMC Clariion EDL virtual tape libraries with 700TB of storage (replicated across Europe) and 4 physical IBM silo’s for long term storage. Utilising both the EMC Modules and scripts to backup the NAS, Exchange (DPM), Oracle and SAP infrastructures. Designing, building and testing the new environment ready for hand over to the support teams, dealing with project management and business owners to enable a smooth and fast migration of backup services to the bank.​​

Contracted into the ABN bank to provide technical expertise to an existing Storage/Backup team during a large scale migration of services into the RBS environment. Liaising with staff from HP, ABN and RBS to provide level 3 support for all problems related to the NetWorker backup environment and surrounding hardware. Environment includes a clustered backup infrastructure built on Solaris and HP-UX, with multiple storage nodes attached to 2 EMC Symmetrix for disk-to-disk backup and 2 StorageTek L5500 for tape media. Total backup for this one service is approximately 10TB per 24 hour period with the majority of this being Oracle.

Interim Storage and Backup Architect / Governance Manager assigned to ensure the successful delivery of two large projects within the Barclays Bank PLC group (Data Centre transformation/migration and Email Consolidation). Nearing the end of these two projects, key technical solutions were deemed un-supportable by multiple vendors resulting in my engagement into the programme. To take control of the technical architecture and solution design and ensure the re-design and implementation of an enterprise storage and backup solution which meets the support matrix of Barclay’s vendors. Liaising with the vendors to build relationships and manage commercial negotiations for the change of solution. Entire solution also replicated to DR site for continuity. Environment included EMC Storage, Brocade SAN, NetWorker/NetBackup, Windows 2003, AIX and VMWare.​​

Technical lead for the design and documentation of a new backup, SAN and storage solution spread across three new data centres and serving over 600 hosts as part of a multi hundred million £ transformation programme. Liaising with the customer at director level to gather requirements and generate proposals which meet the criteria both technically and financially. Provide both high and low level designs in ITIL standard for all three solutions. New infrastructure includes:

• Three EMC Symmetrix storage arrays (DMX1000, DMX3000 and DMX3500)
• 96TB Quantum DXi-7500 Virtual Tape Library
• ADIC i2000 LTO4 Media Library (16 LTO devices)
• VMware ESX
• Brocade SAN Fabric

After a successful delivery of the Geneva project, moved to the UK to become Solution Architect for a larger transformation and managed service programme. Currently in pre-sales due diligence stage, responsible for:

• ​Organising workshops with customer technical staff to gather information on current environment
• Meeting with different levels of customer representatives to understand their business needs
• Analysing findings to generate technical propositions
• Engaging with vendors to establish costing for the technical solution

Meeting many of EMC’s high turnover clients to design and implement large-scale multi site Legato NetWorker solutions with a commercial value of £1M+. These projects included large government organisations using a triangulation of backups across three sites to avoiding the need of moving media offsite and a large industrial company with a 150TB EMC Clariion virtual tape library. Also involved and large migration from NetBackup and EDM backup solutions onto EMC.​​

Contracted to provide all levels of support and consultancy to the Backup and Recovery team during a large Legato to NetBackup migration across the HMRC data centres. To design, test and develop a new monitoring tool in VB and SQL, this tool has now enabled both the Telford and Manchester teams to merge and decommission a total of four old databases. After a very successful three months, given the opportunity for a contract extension. Key points include:

• ​Legato NetWorker versions from 6.1.1 to 7.3
• Libraries including StorageTek, NEO and IBM (sharing via ACSLS)
• Visual Basic using SQL 2000

Part of the Library and Backup Software level three technical support team. Main duties include the support and consultancy of EMC |Legato NetWorker to HP's client base.

• ​​Providing level 3 technical support for Legato NetWorker
• Detailed log analysis and problem resolution in a structured manner
• Dealing with all clients within EMEA
• Re-creating client environments to aid resolution
• Managing relationship with EMC Legato

Joined the Information Management team to provide technical knowledge on a large multi-site project. This role concentrated on the migration of all backups onto a new 'state-of-the-art' backup over SAN system incorporating NetWorker, ACSLS, AlphaStor and IBM LTO2 silos. Areas of reasonability include the key technical consultant to design, test and implement the solution as well as provide technical assistance to the remaining seven members of the team. Excelled in the following areas:

• ​Backup over SAN
• Oracle and SAP backup and recovery
• Project Management
• Tape drive sharing using both ACSLS and AlphaStor

Returned to Unilever as Senior Legato Consultant / DR Specialist, new duties include project management, training of staff and representing the Unilever Legato team on customer sites. Run various DR and BC procedures, including the designing, testing and final analyses of DR / BC plans, organise contracts with 3rd parties for immediate server, data centre and office space when such a disaster occurs. Also the normal day-to-day support, management and installation of Legato systems ranging from single drive servers to 32 drive data centre backup solutions.​​

Employed as a Technical Specialist to provide all levels of support to our customers on their Legato solutions, these include NetWorker, all associated modules and the EmailXtender family of products. Also, since joining MTI, all exams have been passed to reach trainer level in both basic and advanced administration of NetWorker as well as EmailXtender. Attended a Legato Train the Trainer course for NetWorker 7 Advanced Administration. Designed and produced ad-hoc applications to assist in the automatic collection of configuration, changes and log files of NetWorker servers from our customer sites. Gained additional knowledge in:

• ​​Legato NetWorker (5.2.1 up to 7.1.2)
• Instructor led training on the Legato family of products
• EmailXtender, EmailXaminer, EmailXtract and DiskXtender

As one of the Backup and Recovery Technical Specialists at the GIO-ES the duties included providing all levels of support and consultancy to Unilever regarding their Legato solutions. As part of this service we performed disaster recovery tests on customer sites across Europe, configured and maintained 160+ backup servers backing up over 50TB each 24 hours. In addition I have produced in house applications and databases for monitoring Legato using visual basic and SQL. Specialist areas were:

• Legato NetWorker (5.1 up to Beta 7)
• Using Business Suite Modules for SAP, Oracle and SQL
• HP, Compaq, Sun and StorageTek libraries including the STKxx, L700 and MSL
• UNIX (Tru64, Solaris, AIX and HPUX), Windows NT and 2000
• Visual Basic and SQL programming

​In March 2003, was promoted to Disaster Recovery Planner / Legato Consultant and became more concentrated on the design and implement of new backup solutions. In addition, planning and testing the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity processes for Unilever sites across Europe. Enhanced in the following areas:

• ​Project Management
• Documentation
• Team Leadership
• UNIX (Tru64, Solaris, AIX and HPUX), Windows NT and 2000
• Visual Basic and SQL programming

Primarily employed as a member of the Backup & Recovery team in the Distributed System Management Centre, which is responsible in the successful backup of 16TB of data each night spread across 2500+ NT and UNIX servers. As part of this team we also provide disaster recovery for both file loss and server crash. After successful training became Deputy Team Leader ensuring the smooth running of the eight-man team and providing technical assistance to its members and external teams. Gained detailed knowledge of:

• Legato NetWorker (Versions 5.1.1 up to 6.1.2)
• Microsoft Windows NT 4 and UNIX (HP-UX)
• Various tools such as SMS, Visual Basic, SQL and Vantive
• Backup hardware solutions (StorageTek, ATL and HP libraries