So here goes "One small step for man.... One giant leap for mankind"...
I am Tom and at the time of writing this I am a 24 year old Infrastructure Architect working in the IT hosting field (Keeping in with the 'Cloud' buzz word at the moment some might say...). I am one of those tech types that doesn't switch off when they leave the office at 4 or 5 in the afternoon, my mind is constantly spinning with ideas and possibilities that IT brings to the table. What can I achieve with this other hypervisor? What can I do to get this packet from here to there? How can I implement open source IDS/IPS? etc... etc...
You get the picture, technology and more so the challenges it presents give me a real buzz. IT isn't just a job to me, its a way of life and my way of thinking.
I have worked my way through a variety of roles within the industry very quickly and I think thanks to my drive for learning and hunger for information, I have been able to progress technically with every move.
Without mentioning any names, I started out as a 1st line IT help desk support analyst for one of the worlds largest IT companies. A big windows environment where I got my first exposure to things such as Microsoft Active Directory, Citrix, ticketing systems, file shares etc etc...It didn't take me long to get my teeth into that and soon I was creating Windows 2003 domains in VMware Workstation at home, playing with DHCP, DNS, Roaming profiles and most importantly pestering my technical superiors at work for information about how things worked or ...... why they didn't work.
After I while I moved onto a more technical role at another of the worlds biggest IT companies. 2nd Line desktop support.... Same thing as the first, just more in depth and more admin rights on the network.... Every IT guy likes more rights?... right?
This continued and I gained more and more responsibility there, including the chance to play with some MS file and print servers. Ooooohhh Servers!
This is the point where my career kicked into overdrive and my head literally went into information overload.... But most importantly, this is when I really started getting down and dirty with the stuff that makes it all work. Servers, storage and networks.
This is when I joined the ranks of 3rd Line Support. Yes, the 'god like' team of support engineers that work mostly unseen or unheard and only make an appearance when the s**t really hits the fan and 2nd line are running round like a bunch of headless chickens whilst concerned management are waving the proverbial stick of authority and desperately trying to explain to the customer why 180,000 of their users are unable to log in to windows.
I was employed as a member of the 3rd line infrastructure services team, based in a data centre, looking after a production environment for a public facing portal system and its development environments to go with. I never counted but we were talking around 900-1000 servers, a few large SAN's and plenty of networking and encryption kit.
This was again a Windows environment with plenty of MS SQL clusters, IIS and Biztalk. Server 2008 & 2003 were the OS of choice. I learnt a hell of a lot during this time. Our team covered everything, cisco routers, switches, EMC SAN's and all the dell servers themselves...
This was also where I got my first look at disaster recovery solutions as well as one other technology that I would become highly familiar with. VMWare ESXi.
Fast forwarding a few years and having worked with numerous different technologies at '3rd line' level, headed large P2V projects and taken a massive interest in virtualisation..... I am now where I have always wanted to be, which is at the infrastructure design level.
So.... That's a very brief background on my career so far. I will be posting my technical endeavours to this blog as frequently as possible in the hope that My experience might help others with similar interests.
Seeing as I have used the internet as my primary source of information to do what I do.... I thought I should give something back!
Until next time.....
Tom
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