Who is this Brad Payne guy anyway?
Currently, I am a sr. systems engineer for a software company based out of New York. We are in the advertising industry, and our software is used by many of the world’s largest television networks. We provide Software as a Service (SaaS) for many of our clients, and I work with the hardware and software used to provide this service (as well as a few hundred servers for our internal needs). I’ve been primarily working with Microsoft, VMware, and NetApp products to create business solutions for the past 4 years.
Over the course of the past 10 years, I’ve accumulated the following alphabet soup: Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator with a specialization in messaging (MCSA:Messaging), Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA), VMware Certified Professional (VCP3, VCP4,VCP5)
What does all of that jibber jabber mean? Glad you asked. The projects and products that I am currently involved with are:
- Disaster Recovery – VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, NetApp’s SnapMirror, SnapManager for Oracle (SMO), SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI), and DataProtection Manager. We are creating a disaster recovery solution for a multitier applicaiton with an Oracle database backend, JBoss Application layer, and Citrix client/presentation layer.
- Self-Service Cloud – Using a combination of scripts and VMware technologies, I am working on putting together a fully automated cloud infrastructure for our internal development needs. The workflow could be sped up dramatically by removing provisioning/deployment wait times, and with virtualization, automating this process is achievable.
- Application Availability – Virtualization has brought about the ability for applications to be available nearly 100% of the time. There are many unique strategies for achieving this, including VMware’s Fault Tolerance, Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), and application layer clustering (i.e. MS Exchange CCR). I am creating solutions to enable the highest availability for all of our business critical applications, and am continually improving upon these solutions to improve application availability.
- High Performance System Design – Creating systems for the most demanding applications can be difficult. Creating high-performing and scalable solutions is a passion of mine. From system design to monitoring and troubleshooting bottlenecks, performance is an ongoing and interesting area of I.T. that will always be an issue.
- Unified Communications – There are so many ways to communicate these days, I think that it is the responsibility of the systems administrators to research, and implement systems that allow for the most efficient and effective channels of communication for their organizations. Delivering video, voice, text, email to the enterprise is a challenging task, and when you merge all of these services together, these systems are becoming more and more complex. I am currentltly working with a system that my team and I designed for unified communications using Mitel for our PBX, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office Communcations Server 2007 R2.
The kinds of things that consume my time outside of work/hobbies in the I.T. world are:
- Camping / Hiking
- Mountain Biking / Road Biking
- Snowboading
- Watching NCAA sports (Go Hawks!)
- Playing football, hockey, golf, tennis, etc.
- Spending time with my lovely girlfriend Kim and our dog Lucy