About Me
I am a Senior UNIX Engineer specialising in AIX and automation. Expertise in Infrastructure as a Service and deployment/configuration automation with Puppet. I have a passion for building fully automated self-service managed UNIX systems, with built-in operational management and compliance.
Designing resilient, secure, and flexible enterprise-grade compute and hosting services that enable autonomy for business change is at the forefront of what I do.
Content
A place where I can do more long-form posts around UNIX and automation. It hasn’t seen an update in quite some time, but I have every intention of making more frequent updates since moving it over to Jekyll. Watch this space!
For years I maintained my own scratchpad of notes in various txt files. It was clunky, unorganised, and had no formatting or syntax highlighting. I’ve since moved over to using Mkdocs, which allows me to use markdown, and I’m now happy to share them with everyone so they may find some use from it.
Experience
AIX | POWER | Puppet | Lifecycle | Automation
Experience
- Subject matter expert (SME) for ANZ on POWER hardware, and Virtual IO Server (VIOS)/AIX operating systems.
- Design, build, and maintainer of the VIOS and AIX standard operating environments.
- Contributor to the Puppet code that maintains audit/risk compliance on AIX.
- Wrote automation via Puppet of AIX build activities (including Spectrum Scale (GPFS), Oracle Database, and PowerHA SystemMirror).
- Wrote automation via Puppet for the patching of AIX (Technology Levels and Service Packs).
- Wrote scripts to automate and reduce the time required for service transition of AIX LPAR’s from build to operational support.
- Wrote scripts to automate and recude the time required for AIX disaster recovery activities.
- Lead engineer on PowerVM, PowerVC, PowerHA SystemMirror, and Spectrum Scale (GPFS) products.
Achievements
- Recognised as a five time IBM Champion for POWER (2018-2022).
- Nominated for the ANZ CEO Recognition Award.
- Successful Wealth/OnePath datacentre migration.
- Lifecycle and live migration of 800+ AIX LPAR’s from POWER7 to POWER8 hardware.
- Successful migration of ~20 AIX 5.3 LPAR’s into Versioned Workload Partitions (WPAR’s) running on AIX 7.1 for lifecycle management.
- Successful migration of 500+ AIX LPAR’s from EMC to IBM SVC SAN storage with minimal downtime.
AIX | POWER | Lifecycle
Experience
- AIX design and build.
- PowerHA cross-site cluster build and configuration.
- Disaster Recovery for AIX build and design.
Achievements
- Co-authored IBM RedBook publication, PowerVM Best Practices.
- POWER5/6 lifecycle to POWER7 hardware.
AIX | Systems Administration
Experience
- Systems Administrator (AIX, Solaris, Linux).
- IBM SAN (DS4000 & DS5000 series).
- IBM VIOS & HACMP.
- Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).
Honors & Awards
IBM Champions demonstrate practical expertise in IBM technologies while providing extraordinary support and advocacy in IBM digital and local communities.
The IBM Champions program recognizes these innovative thought leaders in the technical community and rewards their contributions by amplifying their voice and increasing their sphere of influence. IBM Champions are enthusiasts and advocates: IT professionals, business leaders, developers, executives, educators, and influencers who support and mentor others to help them get the most out of IBM software, solutions, and services.
Publications
This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides best practices for planning, installing, maintaining, and monitoring the IBM PowerVM® Enterprise Edition virtualization features on IBM POWER7® processor technology-based servers.
PowerVM is a combination of hardware, PowerVM Hypervisor, and software, which includes other virtualization features, such as the Virtual I/O Server.
This publication is intended for experienced IT specialists and IT architects who want to learn about PowerVM best practices, and focuses on the following topics:
- Planning and general best practices
- Installation, migration, and configuration
- Administration and maintenance
- Storage and networking
- Performance monitoring
- Security
- PowerVM advanced features
This publication is written by a group of seven PowerVM experts from different countries around the world. These experts came together to bring their broad IT skills, depth of knowledge, and experiences from thousands of installations and configurations in different IBM client sites.
IBM Systems Magazine - Snapshot
April 2017
Profile feature in IBM Systems Magazine
