Infrastructure Solution Architect with the responsibility for owning the end-to-end architecture for the Single Sign On (SSO) service as part of the global Nokia OVI.com (Ovi Music, Ovi Store, Ovi Messaging, Ovi Maps etc) platform of web services.

The role involves working with R&D, Software Architects, Project Managers and Operations teams in a global virtual team and with a key focus on designing, building and deploying cost effective, high availability, robust, resilient and supportable solutions to support the SSO service as part of the wider Ovi.com platform in an ITIL focused Service Delivery organisationt.

Key Achievements:

Documented and agreed the SSO Infrastructure Roadmap which details the transition of the SSO infrastructure for the next 12 months to a more robust cost effective platform utilising blade servers and automated deployment tools thus reducing time from application delivery to full production deployment.

Led a detailed investigation into severe performance issues with the production system working closely with development, application architects and support, storage engineers, system admin, dba teams and external hardware and software vendors resulting in a number of improvements implemented to bring performance back to an acceptable level. Daily reporting of the issue and investigation to senior level management and directors.

Worked closely with the application architects to produce an infrastructure solution based on standard architecture and virtualisation for the rapid deployment of multiple additional test and integration environments to support the agile development process.

Produced solution designs for key projects including the global roll out of the SSO platform into China and USA, allowing Ovi.com services to be deployed into these local regions.

Instrumental in pushing through an organisational change to create a global cross service line team of solution architects within the Service Delivery department therefore increasing collaboration and allowing a greater focus on the complete ovi.com platform rather than the service specific silos previously in place.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  Dell, HP, Sun servers, EMC and Sun Storage, Cisco Networking.

• OS:

  RedHat, CentOS Linux, VMWare and KVM Virtualisation

• Software:

  Oracle Database and OID, MySQL, Puppet and Cobbler Automation tools

]]> http://www.keithbennett.me/2009/11/press-and-media/feed/ 0 http://www.keithbennett.me/2009/11/guys-and-st-thomas-nhs-trust/ http://www.keithbennett.me/2009/11/guys-and-st-thomas-nhs-trust/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:02:32 +0000 Keith Bennett http://www.keithbennett.me/?p=518 Role:

Workstream Lead responsible for the definition of a technical workstream to plan, remediate and enhance the Trust Technical Spaces including 2 Data Centres and 115 Comms Rooms located over the multi site Trust campus as part of a multi discipline £2M Infrastructure Programme.

Interface between Infrastructure Programme and Technical Delivery teams with responsibility for ensuring all infrastructure designs adhered to Trust standards and supported the full requirements of the programme and the Trust.

Key Achievements:

Documented and agreed audit of all current Trust Comms Rooms for capability, safety and clinical dependencies with an agreed classification of rooms into Evacuate and Fix categories.

Investigated options for the relocation of both Trust Data Centres to provide a new dual site, DR capable service that would reduce risk and enhance the delivery of IT to the Trust.

Managed the Technical Spaces team, with responsibility for changing focus to be more proactive rather than reactive, resulting in the team providing an enhanced service to the department and the Trust.

Delivered a formalised process and delivery mechanism between IT and the Trust Capital Estates department for the delivery of IT requirements for their projects including network capacity analysis, structured cabling implementation and alignment with resource scheduling..

Managed the network and IT infrastructure implementation at a new Trust remote site for 120 users.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  Fujitsu, HP, Sun servers, EMC Storage, Cisco Networking.

• OS:

  RedHat Linux, Windows Server, VMWare 3i.

• Software:

  Oracle Database, MS SQL Server, MS Exchange, multiple clinical applications

I have created this website as I believe that a CV should be clear and concise, it should be brief and showcase the key information to the reader.  However, I also believe that there are times when you need to describe achievements or experiences in more detail.  This is my intention for this site.  It is intended that the site will be used to enhance my CV by giving prospective employers a more detailed description of each role I have undertaken.

Under the career menu you will find details of the permanent and contract roles I have undertaken. You can then select any of the roles and when selected, you will be presented with information displayed on the CV as well as further details about each role. Additionally, where previous employers have been kind enough to provide a LinkedIn recommendation, that will be displayed.

The site also contains an online version of my CV.  The CV is viewable directly on the site and is also available to download.

The CV can be viewed here, and the Career History can be viewed here.

Infrastructure Architect for the Applications Rehosting (Data Centre relocation) workstream, as part of the separation of the Telecoms Division (Talk Talk Group) from Carphone Retail.

Responsible for defining the high level infrastructure strategies for the physical and logical separation of the shared services used by Talk Talk Group within Carphone Retail to a new dedicated Data Centre.

Key Achievements:

Responsible for proposing strategic group wide initiatives for the implementation of corporate Microsoft services including MS Active Directory 2003, MS Exchange 2007, MS Sharepoint 2007 and Call Centre Agent Desktops running on a clustered VMWare 3i architecture with site level Disaster Recovery.

The Separation Programme was given the objective of establishing TalkTalk Group technology independence from CPW Retail and the CPW IT department. The design proposed implementing a new Microsoft Active Directory/Exchange environment, new agent desktop and a new corporate telephony solution, delivered over an independent network, thus allowing a move of legacy TalkTalk staff into the newly formed TTG organisation.

Delivered high level Infrastructure Design proposals for the relocation and rehosting of key business systems to a dual site, DR capable dedicated Data Centres, focusing on reducing costs and providing enhanced service levels.

The relocation and rehosting of TTG applications away from the central CPW IT service was a critical part of the separation programme. The Infrastructure Design was based on a number of key initiatives, primarily, the reuse and enhancement of existing TTG hardware and secondly on the delivery of a new TTG Corporate Microsoft stack of Exchange 2007, Active Directory 2003 and Sharepoint 2007 services running on virtualised VMWare infrastructure.

The designs focused on the ability to utilise and expand the existing site level HDS storage replication services between data centres and added the flexibility provided by VMWare vMotion to provide enhanced levels of service availability.

Produced high level Infrastructure Design proposals for MIS and Data Warehouse separation activities utilising existing investment both hardware and software.

CPW has significant investment in MIS and Data Warehouse technologies from Netezza, Oracle Informatica and Business Objects. Separation of the MIS/DW systems required significant analysis into the products, their lifecycles, the licensing and the applications that utilise them. The design proposals offered TTG/CPW significant improvements over the existing infrastructure by replacing older hardware with newer more cost effective equivalents, enabling both organisations to benefit from greater performance, but at a reduced cost.

Led Infrastructure Design review and produced Infrastructure Design proposal for new TTG only Business Object XI implementation and subsequent migration of TTG universes/reports from the shared BO 6.5 environments.

The main core CPW BO environment was at version 6.5, however, other parts of the TTG business were already running at version XI. A detailed analysis into the current environments and the data sources was undertaken and proposed designs put forward to implement a new environment which included migration of existing 6.5 and XI installations into a fully unified TTG only XI platform with Production, Test and Development environments. The solution took into account the current and proposed data sources and feeds which were proposed to be moved or replicated as part of the MIS/DW separation.

Significant involvement in the production and presentation of business cases to the programme board for the solutions and costs for the proposed Data Centre relocation and separation activities.

As well as documenting the Infrastructure Designs, high level solution designs and costs had to be developed to ensure programme and board level acceptance of the proposed designs. The challenge was to present ideas and solutions to non technical senior directors and business owners, showing how the service will change, but still provide the same level of operational capability currently being received. Also key, was the deep examination into all costs being proposed.

Engaged with group wide departments and 3rd party companies to provide detailed costing and resource estimates.

To ensure all costs were as accurate as possible for the proposed designs and programme cost, significant work was undertaken with internal CPW and TTG teams as well as 3rd party software and hardware providers to bottom out all costs for the infrastructure proposals.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  IBM, HP, Sun servers, HDS Storage, Netezza Storage, Cisco Networking.

• OS:

  Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, RedHat Linux, Windows Server, VMWare 3i.

• Software:

  Oracle 10i Database, Informatica, VMWare VDI, Tibco Messaging, MS Exchange, Singl.eView Billing, Business Objects

LinkedIn Recommendation:

LinkedIn Recommendation - Click to view on LinkedIn

]]> http://www.keithbennett.me/2009/03/carphone-warehouse/feed/ 0 LinkedIn Recommendation LinkedIn Recommendation for this role http://www.keithbennett.me/2008/09/aol-broadband/ http://www.keithbennett.me/2008/09/aol-broadband/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:19:48 +0000 Keith Bennett http://www.keithbennett.me/?p=131 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

LinkedIn Recommendation:

LinkedIn Recommendation - Click to view on LinkedIn

]]> http://www.keithbennett.me/2008/09/aol-broadband/feed/ 0 LinkedIn Recommendation LinkedIn Recommendation for this role http://www.keithbennett.me/2007/11/beacon-homeloans/ http://www.keithbennett.me/2007/11/beacon-homeloans/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:02:21 +0000 Keith Bennett http://www.keithbennett.me/?p=283 Role:

Employed at Beacon to perform the end-to-end Infrastructure design for the implementation of two new multi tier Windows based applications. Led project planning and management of the implementation of the design, and installation and build of all servers, storage and network, resulting in BHL server estate moving from 20 servers to over 100 servers (including 40+ Virtual Servers)

Key Achievements:

Performed a design review of the original solution which resulted in cost saving of over £70k in hardware and software (£310k budget)

My first task at Beacon was to review the current design proposal and make recommendations. The initial design was proposed by the software vendor and included a number of technologies not required for size of the implementation. My review identified areas where BHL could save costs and helped to ensure the project infrastructure was fit for purpose.

• Completed final design of a fully resilient server infrastructure using HP Blade servers and Windows Server 2003 and MS Virtual Server technologies.

Once the design review was completed, I produced an updated design where all non production environments were implemented as virtual servers. The Design included the implementation of a separate network solution, a new backup solution and iSCSI based storage infrastructure solution.

• Multi environment design including Live, System Test, UAT, Development and DR

The design and implemented solution consisted of 5 dedicated standalone environments. Due to the utilisation of virtualisation, each environment was built with exactly the same number of servers, thus reducing errors during testing and development.

• Installation, build and configuration of the solution.

Due to the small IT department at BHL, I took an active part in the racking, stacking, build and configuration of the network and server infrastructure. We built a BHL standard Windows Server 2003 virtual machine and physical machine and used these as templates for the others servers ensuring each server was configured identically. The virtual machines all resided on iSCSI volumes mounted from the central Windows Storage Server.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  HP Blade and Standalone servers, 3COM Networking

• OS

  Windows Server 2003, Windows Storage Server

• Software

  MS Virtual Server, iSCSI, DPR Mortgage Application

Overall design responsibility and focal point for all physical infrastructure components within the VM estate, an environment that included over 150 Unix and Windows servers, Brocade/HDS/NetApp SAN and NAS storage, Oracle and SQL Server databases, VMWare and Citrix technologies.

Managed the Infrastructure Design team (2 Infrastructure Architects), including task planning, mentoring, reviews and personal development.

Role involved ensuring the necessary budget is in place each year for any technical projects as part of the annual IT budgeting process, as well as creation of Infrastructure related projects and driving them forward with key business stakeholders.

Key Achievements:

Creation of an Infrastructure Strategy and roadmap for Virgin Mobile.

Design of a multi-tier, scalable and resilient infrastructure using x86 hardware, Linux, Oracle RAC and GigiSpaces technologies to support the new Virginmobile.com website which has reduced downtime and increased customer sales and self service.

Design, build and system management of an interim development and test environment using VMWare/Linux/Oracle services for virginmobile.com project prior to outsourcing of the service to IBM.

Proposed and designed a number of solutions which have financially benefited VM including the implementations of Njini IAM and BladeLogic, both of which have delivered significant ROI values.

Management of the upgrade of the VM Citrix environment to Citrix Presentation Server 4.

Key infrastructure contact for the design and planning for the implementation of Work Area Recovery and Data Centre Disaster Recovery services through a specialist 3rd party availability provider.

Infrastructure lead for the transition of VM’s outsourcing from CapGemini to Atos Origin, a Data Centre relocation project that moved all Unix and SAN infrastructure from Bristol to Daresbury, with minimal impact to the business.

Ownership of the redesign and implementation of an upgrade to the HDS/Brocade based SAN infrastructure resulting in improved performance and negating the need for further capital investment.

Infrastructure contact from RFP to implementation of the IBM Desktop Management Service project which replaced over 1200 Desktop and Laptop computers with a fully automated and externally managed solution.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  Sun, HP, IBM, Dell, Windows Servers, HDS, NetApp, Brocade Storage

• OS

  Sun Solaris, HP UX, Windows Server 2003, RedHat Linux

• Software

  Oracle, MS SQL, VMWare, Veritas, Citrix, Tibco, GigaSpaces, Singl.eView Billing, ePoint CRM, Strategix ERP, Apache, Tomcat, BladeLogic, Njini

LinkedIn Recommendation:

LinkedIn Recommendation - Click to view on LinkedIn

• Joined CGEY as a member of the Bristol Oracle DBA team, having a brief to increase the revenue and effectiveness of the whole UK Oracle DBA business.

Key Achievements:

Worked with a number of clients on improving their Oracle implementations, as well as working with most of the CGEY in-house DBA teams.

• Provided Oracle Technical Governance throughout CGEY UK and put together a simplified DBA toolset using CA applications. This change significantly reduced CGEY internal costs and meant they were able to provide a more cost effective service to their clients.

• Appointed primary technical contact for Virgin Mobile (VM) account. Main point of contact for Oracle service migration during the project to transition the VM services to the CGEY Toltec data centre.

• Environment Manager for VM, resourcing and and managing CGEY Unix, DBA and Operations teams for the builds of the required integrated development, test and production environments.

• Role evolved into having responsibility for most of the VM infrastructure and its usage. This included Windows and Unix Servers, Oracle databases, SANs and associated backup infrastructure.

• Project managed the implementation of a new backup infrastructure for VM.

• Infrastructure Lead for the implementation of the Singl.eView Billing system and its integration via Tibco with most of the core VM applications including their CRM and ERP systems.