Role:

Infrastructure Architect for the TSA Separation programme to integrate AOL’s UK Broadband network into Carphone Warehouse. Project focus was to relocate or implement new services and applications into a dedicated AOL Broadband Data Centre.

My primary focus was the infrastructure design and implementation of internal and 3rd party managed testing environments to support the project up to implementation.

Key Achievements:

Infrastructure Design for the required programme data migration, testing and integration environments in the new Data Centre. These environments required multiple integration points between internal systems and 3rd party organisations including MDS (Billing and CRM) and CPW Networks (CDRs).

Due to ongoing business as usual development and support, 5 new environments were needed to support the programme and enable the delivery of integration/operational/user acceptance testing, training and data migration. Each environment consisted of dual Sun servers and had to be configured with the core AOL Broadband application stack running Apache, WebLogic and Sybase services. Each environment also required integration to other existing internal and new 3rd party external environments using new and existing interfaces. The key external interface was to the new Martin Dawes Systems (MDS) Dise3G billing and selfcare systems.

Design, management and ownership of the interface register for 40+ application interfaces (SFTP, VPN, Tibco Business Connect, MIS extracts) for all environments utilising the implementation of NAT rules across different network subnets to ensure environment separation.

To ensure each environment had the required connectivity in place, an Interface register was created which documented the required interfaces, firewall rules, ports, services and addresses. Due to the complexity of the interfaces and limited number of 3rd party environments available, Network Address Translation (NAT) was heavily utilised to provide access to services. This also gave the advantage of being able to segregate services via IP address ranges. The register was also used to map the requirements for changes to existing production and non production environments for the live implementation.

Infrastructure Design for the AOL Broadband website. The site is heavily integrated with AOL Screen Name Service (SNS), the externally hosted Customer Selfcare (via MDS) and existing internal sales channels and Knowledge Base systems.

As part of the TSA programme, existing AOL sites / web applications needed to be migrated / replaced and integrated into a new (unified) AOL Broadband Online Portal providing a seamless user experience / journey whilst maintaining existing functionality. The key design driver was to deliver a highly available and resilient platform. Since the online portal will be the gateway to some key services (e.g. Online Help, Self Care, Chat, etc.) the system was designed to be highly available with an SLA uptime of 99.5% and be horizontally scalable. The solution was a 3 tier Apache/Tomcat stack running on multiple RedHat Linux servers separating presentation, business logic and database layers. The design brief was a solution capable of support a peak load of 120k page hits per day.

Technical Delivery management between IT operations and Customer Services for the implementation of new Knowledge Management (Kana IQ) tools. Responsible for delivery of the technical solution engaging with the project, the vendor and the internal IT operations teams.

During the early stages of acceptance testing, the Customer Services project team requested additional help from IT to help deliver 3 new Knowledge Base systems from Kana into production. My role was to correctly engage with all parties and drive the implementation forward into a live service.

Responsibility for ensuring the project Infrastructure strategy and roadmaps adhered to existing company standards and enhanced them where possible.

As part of each design and solution proposed by the programme, we had to ensure alignment with current and proposed strategies that were already in place. Where we introduced new technologies or solutions, these were required to be ratified internally before being proposed as standards for future company adoption.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  HP, Sun servers, HDS Storage, Cisco networking.

• OS

  Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux, Windows Server

• Software

  Oracle, Sybase, VMWare, WebLogic, Apache, Tibco Messaging, Tibco Business Connect, Kana IQ and Response, MDS Dise3g, internally developed applications

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Tags: Contract Infrastructure Architect

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 14:19 and is filed under Contract Roles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.