Certifications
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NetApp Certified SAN Implementation Engineer 7-Mode and Clustered ONTAP ( NCIE-SAN )
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NetApp Certified Backup and Recovery Implementation Engineer 7-Mode ( NCIE-B&R )
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NetApp Certified Data Management Administrator 7-Mode and Clustered ONTAP ( NCDA )
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Red Hat Certified Engineer ( RHCE Certificate
803004733211574 )
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VMware Certified Professional ( VCP3 )
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Symantec Certified Specialist ( Netbackup 6.5 for Unix )
Employment History
Solutions Arhictect
Datalink, Chanhassen MN
February 2008-Present
Provide pre-sales solution design and post-sales implementation services for enterprise and mid-tier
accounts in southeast United States. Focus technologies include the complete NetApp hardware
and software stack, server and storage virtualization, and disaster recovery solutions.
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Lead engineer for Datalink's largest enterprise customer in the Carolinas.
Datalink revenue for this account was approximately $13,500,000 in 2013. During my tenure with this account
revenue grew from $500,000 in 2008 to $13,500,000 in 2013.
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Selected to attend Datalink President's Club for my performance during calendar years 2010, 2012, and 2013.
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Grew revenue in a new account in the media and publishing sector from $0 in January 2014 to $3,000,000 by May 2014.
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Used professional services to build trust with a new mid-sized customer in the healthcare industry in late 2010.
This initial services engagement led to approximately $100,000 in maintenance and hardware business with follow
on business of $1,000,000 since the initial engagement.
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Migrated 100TB of data from two old nodes in an existing 4 node clustered ONTAP array to two new nodes during business hours
with zero impact to users and no downtime for a large healthcare company.
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Migrated a large healthcare company from a NetApp FAS3070 HA-pair to a NetApp FAS3170 HA-pair
with minimal downtime and zero data loss.
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Performed extensive proof of concept demo for a SQL Server data warehouse project that resulted in more than $500,000
in revenue for Datalink.
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Played a key role in expanding Datalink's presence and becoming the trusted advisor to a large enterprise account in
Raleigh, NC. This expanded presence resulted in nearly $2,000,000 in revenue for Datalink during fiscal year 2009.
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Migrated 5 TB of file data from EMC Celerra to NetApp FAS2050 for a large software company based in Raleigh, NC..
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Implemented NetApp FAS6040 cluster for the city of San Antonio, Texas in June 2008.
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Obtained various industry certifications as necessary to help Datalink maintain the highest discount levels with
our partners.
IT Manager
Alcatel-Lucent, Raleigh NC
February 2007-November 2007
Promoted to manager of a team of five analysts responsible
for all computer and network operations at Alcatel-Lucent's Raleigh facility.
Duties included defining team and individual objectives and measuring progress
against the objectives, assisting team members with complex technical
issues, managing NetApp storage capacity, and providing second level support
for desktop issues for a network of 500+ clients.
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Improved help desk user satisfaction from 95% to 97.3% in less than 6 months after becoming manager.
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Implemented Red Hat Network Proxy server for patch management of internal Red Hat clients.
The proxy server provided a central point of distribution and management
for all security patches and bug fixes distributed for the various releases of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux in use at our facility.
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Worked with global DNS team to migrate to QIP solution for world wide
IP and namespace management.
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Worked with business unit managers to upgrade NetApp storage array to new
NetApp solution with more capacity. This project also entailed migrating
to a modern tape backup solution.
Senior IT Systems Analyst
Alcatel USA, Raleigh NC
February 2001-February 2007
Served as the senior technical adviser on a team of
analysts responsible for all computer operations and
network security at Alcatel's Raleigh facility. Served
on multiple corporate technology teams responsible
for defining the overall direction and strategy
for Alcatel's world-wide IT infrastructure.
Achievements:
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Migrated 5 TB of company data from a Hitachi 9960 to
NetApp 940 storage appliances.
This migration saved the company $8,000 per month in recurring
lease payments.
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Migrated from a tape only backup solution to a disk to disk to tape
solution utilizing a NetApp Nearstore R200 storage appliance.
This migration sped up data restores and made it possible for users
to do self service restores, thereby reducing help desk call volume.
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Implemented a server monitoring solution on Linux using Nagios
to monitor multiple Unix and Windows servers as well as our
network switches and routers.
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Implemented a server and network capacity planning solution
on Linux using Cacti and RRDtool. This solution allowed the
company to better respond to changing IT needs by maintaining
historic server performance and network bandwidth statistics.
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Relocated to a new facility over a 3 day weekend with
no impact on the user community. All datacenter systems
and services were functional before the first employee
arrived at the new facility.
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Installed and configured a Sun Fire 4800 server in dual
partition mode with 2 domains for a critical customer demo
that generated significant revenue for the company.
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Migrated 3 TB of engineering data from an EMC Symmetrix 8760
storage array to a Hitachi Lightning 9960 storage array.
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Migrated critical network services (DNS, NIS, Sendmail/Imap)
from a Sun E3000 running Solaris 7 to a Sun E3500 running
Solaris 8 with no impact to the user community.
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Implemented TightVNC for use by the System Test group so they
could run tests remotely over dial-up lines.
Senior Network Administrator
Sourcealliance, LLC, Morrisville NC
January 2000-January 2001
Served as technical lead of a team of administrators
responsible for all computer and network operations at
an e-commerce company. Managed the relationship with
Sitesmith, which was the hosting partner Sourcealliance
selected to host all production systems. Received an
award from the CEO for my role in the Sourcealliance
facility move.
Achievements:
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Built the corporate IT infrastructure (all servers,
switches, routers, firewalls, etc) from the ground up
under severe time constraints.
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Migrated the development environment from Sun servers to HP
servers in less than one month. All services, from the
back-end Oracle database servers, to the front end web
servers were migrated with no impact on web site
development deadlines.
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Migrated the corporate firewall (Checkpoint Firewall-1 and
VPN-1) from a Windows NT server to a pair of Nokia IPSO
based IP440 firewall appliances.
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Migrated DNS for 12 domains from an external provider
to an internal Sun server reducing monthly IT expenses by
$500/month.
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Implemented the production web server farm using HP servers,
iPlanet Webserver, and F5 BigIP load balancers.
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Implemented a content replication system for moving web
content from development to production using open source
software and ksh scripts that saved the company thousands
in software licensing costs.
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Successfully integrated the Unix fileservers with the
Windows 2000/NT environment using Samba.
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Helped plan and execute two data center moves and one
complete facilities relocation.
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Migrated network infrastructure from Nortel to Cisco
equipment during facility move with no impact on
the user base.
Complete work history available upon request.
Technologies Managed During My Career
Operating Systems: Linux ( Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu ), Windows ( Server 2012, Server 2008, Server 2003, 7, XP ), Solaris ( 10, 9, 8 ), HP-UX ( 11, 10.x ), OpenBSD.
Hypervisors: VMware vSphere 3.5, vSphere 4.x, vSphere 5.x.
Storage Technologies: NetApp FAS8000 series, FAS6200 series, FAS3200 series, FAS2200 series, EMC Clariion series, Hitachi Lightning 9900 series, ATL tape libraries, Quantum / Adic tape libraries, StorageTek tape libraries, Veritas Foundation Suite ( Filesystem, Volume Manager ), Veritas Netbackup ( 6.5.x ).
Software: NetApp Data ONTAP ( 7-mode ) 6.5.x, 7.x, 8.x, NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP ( cDOT ) 8.1.x, 8.2.x, NetApp Snapmirror and Snapvault ( 7-mode and cDOT ), NetApp Open Systems Snapvault ( OSSV ), NetApp Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere, NetApp SnapDrive for Windows and Unix, NetApp SnapManager for SQL, NetApp SnapManager for Exchange, Red Hat Kickstart, Red Hat Satellite, Solaris LiveUpgrade, Solaris Jumpstart, Solaris Flash Archives, Solaris Volume Manager, Sendmail, Postfix, Apache.
Server Hardware: Sun Fire ( 4800, V240, V125 ), Sun Enterprise ( 6500, 4500, 3500 ), Sun Netra ( T1405, T1 ), HP PA-Risc servers ( N, L, D, and A class), Dell and HP Intel based servers.
Security Technologies: Checkpoint Firewall-1 and VPN-1, Nokia IPSO firewall appliances ( IP650, IP330 ), RSA SecureID tokens, IP Filter, Netfilter ( iptables ), OpenVPN, GnuPG, PGP.
Network Technologies: Cisco switches and routers ( 6500, 3700, 2600 ), F5 BigIP load balancers,.
Protocols: TCP/IP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, POP, CIFS, NFS, SSH, NetBIOS.
Languages: Fluent in Perl, Korn shell and PowerShell. Basic knowledge of Python, C, XML, SQL, and HTML..
Education
Copyright © 2014 by Brandon Kitchen.
Distribution by employment agencies without my permission is forbidden.