Engineer Manager

Alexander D. Gonta

** ******** *****, ****** ****, NJ 07305, 201-***-**** Home, 201-***-**** Cell

Email: **************@*****.*** http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergonta

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Windows, VMWare Engineer with 20 years’ experience in high pressure SLA driven environments seeks senior and challenging role. Have progressed through the ranks and have broad experience in application packaging, server support, project management, team lead, and design role in both Virtualized and non-virtualized Windows environments. Seeking a position where I can utilize my broad depth of overall IT experience in highly demanding, fast past environments to produce impact on the stability and uptime of a company’s mission critical business systems. Have in depth project management experience as well as in-depth technical knowledge of supporting large scale, global, mission critical environments.

Take Charge type of individual with ability to lead projects

Often acted in the role of a Team lead with responsibility for managing a project, people and budget

Work well with a wide range of cultures and personalities

React quickly and remain calm in the moment of crisis

EXPERIENCE

ALLERGAN PHARMACEUTICALS, Rockaway, NJ March 2016 –Present

Senior Hypervisor Technical Architect for VMWare/Windows

Work as part of the Server Engineering team, that sets the standards for the L1 NOC and L2 teams.

Create standard documentation, and SOP documentation, of Windows Build (2008,2012), VMWare Blade Server build and all documentation that acts as best practices and design documentation for the environment.

Conduct training of lower level technical teams with precise documentation

Experienced with 100+ vMWare ESX hosts and 6000+ virtual servers instances.

Work in a large virtualized environment that spans multiple US Cities as well as the globe.

Experience as a Level 3 server administrator..and architectural design/engineering group.

Experience in a multi-domain environment, involving with global sites across WAN connections.

Experience in with large Cisco UCS environments (200+ blades).

Experience or ability to run project to migrate users and systems from one domain to another as part of company acquisitions

Extensive (9+ years) with vMWare including the ability to make design decisions for new implementations following vMWare best practice.

Ability to troubleshoot multiple vMWare vCenters.

Upgraded from Vcenter 5.0 to 6.0

Configured Zorto for site to site replication (like SRM).

Performed cluster upgrades, environment wide, in the U.S and across the globe, from VMWare 5.1 to VMWare ESXi 6.0 on a node-by-node, cluster by cluster basis, using update manager.

Experienced in Converting from Hyper-V to vMWare for Virtual machines

Supported Hyper V in Bulgaria and Poland Locations

Capacity planning: Involved in capacity planning discussions, along with storage team.

Capacity planning: Created capacity planning reports to analyze performance, capacity, and growth.

Experience in designing, implementing and testing physical and virtual system disaster recovery solutions

Ability to make design decisions on leveraging storage in the VMWare environment

Created capacity planning reports to analyze performance, capacity, consolidation opportunities for SQL Clusters, Oracle Clusters and various Web Clusters

Ability to make design decisions on leveraging storage in the VMWare environment

Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Ability to write and update concise and logical technical documentation, including, but not limited to; diagrams, charts, specifications and design models and power point presentations.

Ability to communicate at an executive level and articulate business value of technical solutions

Ability to work with team members, at all levels, decision makers, and stakeholders to define business requirements and systems goals, and to identify and resolve business systems issues

Function as a mentor to provide knowledge transfer to peers and IT staff

Ability to make strategic hardware and software recommendations

Provide 2nd/3rd level support in keeping 100% up-time of mission critical virtual infrastructure. Resolve associated system outages and other incidents

Ability to be on call or assure critical incident response 24x7x365.

Experience with compliance of FDA (GxP), SOX, HIPPA, or related regulated environments

EISAI PHARMACEUTICALS, Woodcliff Lakes, NJ July 2015 –January 2016

Independent consultant to Accenture, Inc. Senior Onshore Engineer for VMWare/Windows

Technical Lead responsible for Complex support environments consisting of both Linux and Windows Servers virtualized within VMWare 5.1 and 5.5 environments. This includes project management, troubleshooting, triage, engineering, and support of offshore team.

Responsible for being Tier III support for Tier I and Tier II offshore staff.

Leverage 9 years of VMWare experience as a subject matter expert on VMWare

Responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting a 7 node VDI desktop cluster

Responsible for supporting Intel and AMD multimode clusters in 4 separate locations

Responsible for coordinating with Storage Team in all LUN presentation to VMWare hosts in rolling out new HP Blades (BL 460 and BL 465 series)

Extensively worked with HP G7 and G8 server blades.

Maintain server up-time in a mixed Windows 2003, 2008 and Windows 2012 server environment.

Maintain server up-time in a mixed RedHat 4.8, 5.1, 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0 environment.

Support all non virtualized such as HP DL 360, DL 380, DL 580 machines across entire enterprise across all U.S locations.

Perform general server troubleshooting and maintain uptime.

Create root cause analysis reports for all P1 and other outages.

Create detailed technical procedures for offshore team to follow

Provide technical leadership and guidance to offshore team members and act as an escalation engineer for all matters as a client facing engineer.

Responsible for providing 3rd-level operational support, entailing excellent communication and problem solving skills along with project planning and project lead experience. Provide mentoring to more junior server team members in the offshore team. Act as a client facing engineering responsible for summarizing the accomplishments of the Wintel and Hypervisor teams activities to both Accenture and EISAI management.

Report to various levels of management, from department heads to managing directors. Create Powerpoint presentations summarizing the group’s accomplishments across several technology towers.

Incident and Problem Management – responsible for identifying, isolating, and resolving technical incidents and problems (in the context of ITIL) for all systems under management

Experience working in validated environment with regulatory controls

Support VMWare 5.5 and VMWare 5.1 server farms with workloads between 400 to 800 guest machines.

Support DRS, VMotion, HA and other VMWare features on BL 460 blade servers

Produce and maintain existing documentation (e.g., admin procedures, SLAs, etc. and create procedures and necessary.

Provide technical leadership in questions involving such software as S.R.M, and VRealize

QVC Inc.,West Chester, P.A April 2015-July 2015

Manage the migration of 45 Terabytes of Data from Windows files servers and Legacy Centera NAS device to newly purchased Isilon Device

Created a complete soup to nuts project plan, including hardware phase, data discovery and remediation phase, and identified all risks and dependencies

Manage one QVC server engineer, one QVC storage engineer, and three EMC engineers assigned to the project.

REGENERON PHARMACEUTICALS, TARRYTOWN, NY 03/2014 –02/2015

Data Center VMWare Engineer

Knowledge of Microsoft Active Directory and Group Policy Management

Maintain and Monitor three separate VMWare environments: VMWare 3.5, and ESX 5.0 and ESX 5.1 Server farms

Experience designing, implementing and managing enterprise server solution with high availability requirements

Perform V2V and P2V migrations as needed from legacy environments to newer Vblock 5.1 environment.

Manage various disk storage devices and monitor disk space growth.

Perform general server troubleshooting and maintain uptime.

Maintain VMware cloned images and templates.

Support Rack-and Stack and cabling of a server in Fiber to the Storage and Ethernet to the Network.

Extensively worked with HP G7 and G8 server blades.

Experience in P2V and V2V using VMware Converter/Plate Spin 6.8.x./Portlock Storage Manager

Extensive experience in migration of Data Shares from Windows 2008 Servers to NAS and accuracy of NTFS permissions during copy job, with subsequent retirement of the individual Windows 2008 server.

Extensive experience using Dell/Quest Server Migration Utility, Beyond Compare, and robocopy methods as server to NAS copy job methods.

Manage iSCSI attached and Fiber attached storage, including Dell Compellant, EMC, and HitachI

Perform VRanger Backups of VMware images

Maintain server uptime in a mixed Windows 2003, 2008 and Windows 2012 server environment.

Experience working with Enterprise SANs (Fiber & iSCSI)

Incident and Problem Management – responsible for identifying, isolating, and resolving technical incidents and problems (in the context of ITIL) for all systems under management

Experience working in validated environment with regulatory controls

Understanding of IT Governance and controls for SOX and FDA compliance

Wrote SOP procedure for Server decommissioning process.

Wrote SOP for V2V procedure to LUNS in SRM Site Pairing, as part of the Disaster Recovery Planning

Wrote SOP of how to use Platespin to do multiple P2V conversions simultaneously

Wrote SOP of how to do Vranger Backups and created Visio Drawings of the arrangement of VA’s

Participate in project planning and execution

Organizational Skills, including the ability to manage time and multiple tasks

Communication skills – reporting to management on project status

Manage individual projects or portions of larger projects and deliverables.

TATA CONSULTING GROUP: 8/2011-3/2014

XL AMERICAS INSURANCE, STAMFORD, CT 10/2012 - 03/2014

Assignment II: Technical Service Delivery Manager, Via Tata Consulting

Responsible for the oversight of all projects within the Team

Provide regular reports on system status, capacity management and usage, and maintain records on all network and distributed systems inventory

Supervised all Core Infrastructure system employees, offshore and onshore, providing them with appropriate training and resources to perform their responsibilities

Attend regular management meetings; Provide necessary project communications

Have Background and understanding of geographically distributed Microsoft environments.

Provide “computing” services on a day-to-day basis consistent with Service Level Agreements

Research, recommend, and implement where appropriate new technologies within the infrastructure areas to meet the client’s evolving business needs. Work in a multi-vendor environment. Familiar with Large Data Centers.

Providing accurate and timely completion of all system requested activities

Responsible for employee technical/professional development. Staff mentoring and team building as a key job component

Manage the offshore leads, who in-turn managed their respective sub-teams: the AS/400 lead, the Unix Lead, the Storage Lead, and the VMWare and Wintel Lead. Supervised all team leads, and an overall team of 30 both onshore and offshore.

Follow all ITIL Processes, change controls and methodology.

Coordinate employee activities to ensure proper support coverage in relation to project initiatives

Act as liaison and customer advocate between department, technical support teams and its customer base and outside vendors

Wrote SOW’s for all projects defined outside scope of work of normal delivables

Created Detailed documentation, including drawings, of Backup infrastructure across all sites

Wrote Documentation to outline shift hand-over procedures across different offshore teams.

Definition, procurement and quality support of all computing, NOS, Data Center, and telecommunications services and infrastructure

GENRE INSURANCE COMPANY, TRUMBELL, CT 08/2011 – 10/2012

Assignment I: Infrastructure Senior Support Engineer, Via Tata Consulting

Responsible for primarily maintaining the Novell File and Print environment and IAM environment, while engineering and performing a migration to Windows 2008 and Active Directory. Served as the Project Manager of the Migration Project

Support a Global, highly virtualized environment of Windows, Linux and NetWare virtualized within VMWare ESX 4.1

Single Handedly did P2V migration of 155 NetWare servers across the globe.

Extensive experience in Windows and NetWare server to NAS copy migrations, to consolidate data whenever possible and eliminate individual file and print servers.

Act as a technical liaison between Client's customers and third-party software/hardware vendors

Produce and maintain existing documentation (e.g., admin procedures, SLAs, etc.).

Participate in all Disaster Recovery site testing and write recovery procedures across multiple operating systems.

Identity Management Work: Support a complex and interconnected LDAP application authentication environment based on Novell’s Identity Manager 3.6 and associated drivers.

Novell to Linux Migration Work: Participated in the migration of a hybrid SLES 11/NetWare 6.5 LDAP/iDM 3.6 environment to a pure SLES environment only, including moving SLP, time services and NetIQ/IdM drivers over from one to the other.

Wrote SOP of how to create a Linux Build specific to running eDirectory versus Oracel 8i

LDAP work: Worked with Novell Sentinel as an event driven security tool. Support Dev, QA and Production LDAP environments with an eDirectory to Active Directory driver, and an Oracle Driver.

Wrote SOP of how to migrate IdM 3.5 to 3.6 drivers across operating systems

Novell to Windows Migration Work: Heavily involved in the planning and migration of file and print services from NetWare 6.5 environment to a pure Windows 2008 environment. Simultaneously rolled out Avamar backup as part of building out the Windows 2008 server farm in Europe, Asia Pacific and the U.S

Excellent understanding of NTFS and Share Permissions, as well as Group Policy

VMWare Experience a good working knowledge of ESX/VSphere and VCenter. Including experience with server deployment and configuration, and monitoring server performance, to include capacity and optimization.

Participate in all capacity planning meetings, requirements gathering, and provide high level input.

Work in a tightly knit team. Balance project workload and daily tasks.

Have Background and understanding of geographically distributed Microsoft environments.

Provide “computing” services on a day-to-day basis consistent with Service Level Agreements

Good understanding of various tape backup systems, as well as disk to disk replication methods, such as EMC’s Avamar. Data Streams were able to transfer faster. Worked well in Disaster Recovery scenario combined with being a good fit and integration with the VMWare environment. File level and Image level restores possible as well.

Performed Avamar agent installs on NetWare, Linux and Windows guests and led this project.

Worked with EMC Centera Archive system. Familiar with storage according to organizational and application policies.

Research, recommend, and implement where appropriate new technologies within the infrastructure areas to meet the client’s evolving business needs

Experience with disaster recovery methods, and file replication and disk to disk duplication methods.

Well versed in AntiVirus, End-point Encryption and WUS update services in creating a secure computing environment.

Provide regular reports on system status, capacity management and usage, and maintain records on all network and distributed systems inventory

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, NEW YORK 06/2010 - 03/2011

Senior Systems Analyst / Engineer

Responsible for supporting 3,000 public facing computers and 3,800 staff computers at a renowned New York City Institution

Solely designed the migration of Windows XP to Windows 7, while simultaneously migration from ZenWorks 7 running on NetWare 6.5 to ZCM 10 running on Susse Linux and Windows satellite servers.

Wrote detailed documentation of how every application should be deployed, including testing methods.

Wrote detailed documentation of how Satellite servers are arranged per subnet and how they communicate with central ZCM software distribution server

Wrote detailed documentation of how to setup WUS in the environment as central patch management server.

Perform the combined duties of an operational support engineer, Project Manager, Quality Assurance analyst and application packager

JPMORGAN-CHASE 02/2010 - 04/2010

Senior Systems and Identity Management Administrator

Operations and Engineering role within a highly distributed global enterprise organization, with offices in Asia, Europe, and throughout the Continental United States

Supported LDAP running on eDirectory and NetIQ environment running on RedHat, that is virtualized within VMware-ESX

Hands-on technical position with a focus on supporting eDIRECTORY on a mix of Solaris and Linux Red Hat Servers

Job entails supporting Single Sign On and Access and Identity Management, with a focus on Novell Identity Manager. Job required the incumbent to have a strong and broad technical foundation as well as a strategic mindset, good communication skills and the ability to collaborate well with others

METROPOLITAN TRANSIT AUTHORITY OF NY & NJ 09/2009 - 12/2009

Senior Systems Administrator

Data Center migration and design from M.T.A midtown to newly formed M.T.A. BSC.

Extensive server to server, and server to NAS copy job experience to perform data migrations.

Job entailed multiple methods of supporting acquired brands/companies: Lift and Shift data center and fold the original data center, or data migration, or Physical to Virtual Migration as necessary

Complete data center build out, server build out of file and print and GroupWise environment, combined with a P2V migration of relevant application servers.

TD-BANK NORTH AND COMMERCE BANK MOUNT LAUREL, NJ 10/2008 – 07/2009

Systems Engineer/Project Management Associate

Engagement consisted of a hybrid Project Management and Server Support role in the integration of two large Banking organizations: TD-Bank Purchasing Commerce Bank and Hudson Savings Bank.

Responsible for architectural design input, documentation, and cluster creation for the combined organization. All Commerce Data and ZFS methods were transferred to TDBank's Environment.

Ability to function in a large Scale Banking environment, and with multiple levels of reporting structure, and have shown ability to work independently and as part of a team.

Provided end-to-end project documentation, from inception, to design, to final resolution

PUBLICIS GROUPE/ RE: SOURCES, NY 03/2007 - 06/2008

IT Senior Operations Analyst / Team Lead

Job entailed the being the lead NY support engineer while simultaneously Project Management of acquired companies into one technical framework of parent brand. Involved aspects of incorporating what were separated, geographically disbursed environments and teams, into one combined, supported entity.

Job entailed multiple methods of supporting acquired brands/companies: Lift and Shift data center and fold the original data center, or data migration, or Physical to Virtual Migration as necessary.

Met and communicated with all key stakeholders before, after and during the migration project. Was very effective in customer interaction and in managing customer expectations and meeting deliverables

Supervised 2 engineers in New York and had a West Coast Counter Part, and a Mid-Atlantic States Counter Part.

Responsible for providing 3rd-level operational support, entailing excellent communication and problem solving skills along with project planning and project lead experience.

Responsibilities included supporting New York, Boston, and all of New England, Rochester, Florida, and Pennsylvania, and all servers in all branch offices on the Eastern Seaboard along with the Headquarters in New York. Supported 1,600 New York users, and 4,500 users overall in my district. Supported a very large server farm and complex team.

Supported remote offices with discrete servers, and responsibilities also included supervising and mentoring the more junior offsite desktop/junior server administration team members in New England and Pennsylvania.

Saved the company millions of dollars in successful recovery of 21 Terabyte SAN during emergency outage, via quick thinking and vendor involvement. Would otherwise have involved weeks of tape restores and loss of data and loss of revenue for weeks.

CONTINUUM HEALTH CARE PARTNERS, NEW YORK, NY 09/2004 – 03/2007

Server Engineer/Application Packaging

Was a 3 year employee, of vendors service Continuum Health Care Partners, a partnership of medical hospitals in New York, and was initially an employee of Cap-Gemini Ernst and Young and later, First Consulting Group, in support of Continuum Health Care Partners. Initially, a member of the Server Team, and later, a member of the Application Packaging/Q&A team.

Prior Experience 1994-2004

Contract Engagements – Systems Integration, Server Engineer, Solutions Analysis

Full client list and responsibilities are available upon request

TECHNICAL ACUMEN

SOFTWARE: Microsoft Office 2003 Suite (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, FrontPage, Outlook), Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project, WordPerfect/Corel suites, Lotus Office Suite, Learning Space, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer; Visio, Microsoft Project, Quicken, ProComm Plus, GroupWise, Sybase / Tape Library agents, NDS for NT, DirXML 1.1a, IDM 2.0, IDM 3.0. (Novell Identity Manager, now called NetIQ.)

NETWORK: Microsoft Windows 2012, 2008,2003, 2000, NT4 Server and Workstation; Active Directory, Terminal Server, Citrix, VMWare-ESX 3.5/4.0/5.0/5.1, Susse, and RedHat Linux; Novell NetWare 4.x,5.x,6.x,iPrint,iManager,GroupWise 5.5-8.0 PCAnywhere 10; McAfee and Norton Antivirus; WUS server, Patchlink, ePO Policy Orchestrator, DHCP, DNS, WINS, ZENWorks 1.1-7.0 and 10.0 Software Distribution, Admin Studio 7.0, Outlook Web Access, Citrix 4.5; Ghost; tape backup products: Cheyenne/CA ArcServe 5.5-11.5, Veritas Backup Express, Netbackup, HP-Data Protector,Vranger

HARDWARE: Compaq/HP DL 360, DL 380, DL580, 8000, HP servers (G2-G8 series). Familiar with Blade Servers BL series. IBM xSeries, and eSeries. ADIC Scalar 1000, Storage Works MSA 1000 and MSA 1500, HP EVA 5000 and HP EVA 8000 (active/active and active/passive) clusters and Dell Compellent Storage. Familiar with iSCSI, NFS, and Fiber attached SAN and NAS storage, De-duplication

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS/TRAINING

NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, NEWARK, NJ 1994

BS, Electrical Engineering

Training via New Horizions.

.VMWare-ESX 3.5/4.0/5.0

Training via Westcon Learning Center

Novell Netware Training; Novell Linux Desktop 10.3, Novell SFT-III and Vinca Certified. C..N.E Novell NetWare 3.12

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