Richard Boyle

Initially hired as Senior VMware Engineer and promoted to the Hosting Practice Manager for all hosting in the UK

This involved managing a team of 8 as well as running the technical and design aspects of a project to consolidate 14 Datacenter down to 3 within the UK that manages all in-house hosting and VMware Cloud offerings as well as maintaining BAU day-to-day tasks within the team

As an engineer, I managed and implemented several small and large shared and private VMware solutions

My biggest achievements as an engineer were:

• Designing and building a VMware-hosted stack for a major financial company splitting off as a separate entity from its current owners. This was an 8-month project which involved architecting out multiple solutions for MSSQL AGs, Web Servers, Custom Application Servers, Load Balancers, Virtual Firewalls and backups and DR for these
• Creating the HLDs and LLDsand then building to these specs
• Ensuring monitoring is in place for all solutions and services offered and ensuring that the relevant documentation is in place
• Rebuilding 2 independent sets of VMware Infrastructure after an incident. This was a full rebuild of vSphere Hosts, vCenter, vSAN, Backup Storage, Backup Servers and DR Servers. Both for the shared VMware Cloud offering and a Private VMware Cloud offering

As a Practice Manager my key roles are as follows:

• Ensure BAU is maintained
• Ensure change management is correctly followed
• Ensure processes are followed or Written if missing
• Conduct regular 1-2-1's
• Weekly ticket number reporting to senior management
• Escalation point for issues within the team
• Ensuring SLAs are met
• Integration of new infrastructure and team members brought on through acquisitions.

• A continuation of my employment from StratoGen Internet Ltd, this was a transfer from our UKoffice to our US one based out of New York office in the United States
• My duties increased toincluding the sole running of the US based infrastructure and clients and the entire globalinfrastructure and clients during out of hours in the UK
• Some of my key achievements in this rolewere:
• Planning and building out a full new 10 rack datacenter deployment from working with thedatacenter on the footprint and power requirements, working with the vendor on ordering anddelivery of all equipment, planning the rack layout as well as cable schema, working with ournetworking department to plan the network layout and ensure all the correct equipment andextras were on order (such as Cat6, MM Fibre, SM Fibre, Twinax cables, SFPs, etc)
• Once theequipment and space was all on site physically installing it and getting it ready for deploymentover a 3 day period
• Once installation was completed the entire infrastructure needed buildingready for new public and private cloud deployments
• This included configuring the Solidfire SAN,working with networking to ensure tenants and contracts were in place on the new Cisco ACInetwork stack and building, configuring all the Cisco UCS chassis and blades ready for ESXideployment and then deploying ESXi that meets our standard deployment for ease of use bycolleagues as well as meeting our security standard e.g following the VMware Hardening guide
• Once everything was deployed full testing had to be completed to ensure everything was readyfor production use
• I also had to ensure than full documentation of this deployment was accurateand available for my colleagues to make use of once it was live
• As part of the deployment of the new datacenter I was responsible for migrating 2 of our largestprivate cloud customers
• The first was a 10 blade deployment which was to be a straight like forlike migration with exception of a migration of Physical Cisco ASA Firewalls to VMware NSX-v
• Networking
• The second was a migration from a 5 rack physical server deployment running
• Openstack to a Blade architecture running VMware ESXi and Hyper-v, this required building outa full tenant within Cisco ACI for both to ensure the networking met their needs (both externaland lan to lan or over VM to VM with the use of Micro segmentation)
• Both of these requiredconstant communication with the customer along with weekly progress status report meetingsand then working with them closely throughout their customer migrations and then afterwards toensure a smooth transition took place
• Planning and Building out a single rack deployment in both Australia and Canada, this involvedworking as part of a team of 2 to fully document, plan and physically install networkingequipment, sans, power and chassis/blade infrastructure
• Tested and deployed globally infrastructure to run VMware Cloud Director Availability for use asan alternative DR solution to our current Zerto offering
• This included working closely with
• VMware to test as the new version 3.0 was still in Beta at the time, the design a deploymentguide to ensure that I could deploy it quickly and efficiently once it was ready for production aswell as to ensure that my colleagues would be able to deploy it on any new sites that wouldcome online, this ensure that there is a standard deployment across the entire platform
• Once itwas ready to deploy I deployed it within 4 of our sites in the US, UK, Australia and Singaporeready for new customers
• All of the above was in addition to my BAU work as a technical support engineer and providing pre-sales support for new customers and existing customer for uplifts.

• Part of a team of five to Monitor, Manage and Maintain the cloud infrastructure in our UK and USdata centres
• I was also responsible for dealing with any customer tickets and phone calls andresolving any issues they reported
• Part of my duties also included attending sales meetings withpotential clients to vet and suggest possible solutions
• Two of the main projects I have worked onwere:
• Implement a VMware based DR site for all clients who utilize the DR as a service product weoffered
• Designed, planned and implemented a large 30 server OpenStack environment for a high profilemonitoring solution company
• I have also deployed several smaller OpenStack environments, designed and deployed publiccloud environments in UK and US based on VMware ESXi and VCD, I rebuilt the monitoringplatform so it automates off MediaWiki based knowledge base system all the while dealing withdaily support of large customer base
• One of the key features about the deployments that I havecompleted is that they utilize load balancing, completed networking, full redundancy andautomation.

• Originally work for CloudData before the company was acquired and bought over by Selection
• Services
• My responsibilities included being the main point of contact for a sub set of high profilecustomers, dealing with any issues they had, suggesting possible improvements and attendingmonthly meetings to discuss the overall status of their Cloud platforms
• One of the main customers
• I dealt with were a mobile payment developer dealing with banks and other suppliers for mobilebased payment systems, this required working closely with pre sales engineers to design and builda fully PCI compliant platform and ensure it remained fully compliant
• I also worked with the Headof Infrastructure to plan and implement a full 3 site core network upgrade which took place over thecourse of a week
• This experience by itself gave me vast knowledge and experience in workingwithin a data centre environment.

• Worked as part of a team to UAT and log any issues with new systems that Tesco were bringing onboard
• Primarily work on their order websites for their Books and Direct services
• During myemployment I was part of a team of 2 who implemented several HTML/JavaScript based systemsto aid other departments in removing some manual labour in certain aspects of their day-to- dayduties.

• Worked for Manpower on behalf of BT, I originally started on the 118500 directory enquiries line butlater moved to the billing department, dealing with customer billing related issues.

• Originally hired as technical support for the BT Corporate ADSL desk moved on to support for the
• Corporate SDSL and eventually became second line support for the desk
• I dealt with escalatingissues previously reported to BT Wholesale and assisting the first line agents with queries theycould not deal with.