Thomas H Jones II

Summary:I have spent the last 10+ years of my professional and academic careers accumulatingan extensive skill set in systems support, internetworking infrastructure, project planning and site design/redesign. I acquired these skills while: working as a senior UNIX engineer for an established web hosting company; providing professional support services for a storage vendor; acting as a senior technical engineer for a UNIX vendor; and while helping to establish a new, regional ISP. I primarily seek employment in proactive functional areas.

Experience:

Wells Landers, Inc. (Great Falls, VA) / June 2004 - Present

Principal Engineer: In this role I provide professional consulting services to Wells Landers’ and Wells Landers’ strategic partners’ customers. Primary services revolve around high availability, disaster recovery, data replication and data protection services. Implementation services have been provided across platforms in both heterogenous and single-vendor environments. Have done implementations of various Veritas technologies in Solaris, AIX 5L and HP environments including: local and geo-clustering, custom cluster-agent development, replication, snapshotting and volume management. Have performed installations and upgrades of the StorageTek ACSLS and ACSLS-HA products in open systems and mainframe environments. Provide documentation, knowledge-transfer and other project-related services.

Digex, Inc. (Beltsville, MD) / May 1999 –June 2004

Senior Operations Engineer (IV):This was the most senior technical position within the Unix Operations group. The Unix Operations group, as a whole, is responsible for the day to day management of over 1400 Sun Enterprise and SunFire class servers, world wide. Operations engineers are charged with acting as support and coordination resources for the Operations group. We perform: training and mentoring of junior staff; creation of documentation and technical curricula for use both inside and outside of the Operations group; infrastructure planning and deployment; and, handling of critical issues that arise. My specific functions include: acting as team lead for the shift-based escalation engineers; being resident high availability expert (with in-depth knowledge of both Veritas Cluster Server –Digex’s primary clustering solution - and SunCluster 3.x); pre and post sales technical consulting; site design, analysis and redesign; migration/upgrade planning; incident analysis and reporting. My duties require extensive interdepartmental coordination and contact with customers - by phone, written correspondence and in person.

Applications Support Engineer Team Lead:During early phase of providing application support services, I was charged with helping hire and organize the group that became the (Java) Application Support Team. This required gaining a basic familiarity with the products supported at the time. This familiarity aided in troubleshooting customer issues and in determining qualified job candidates for the team.

Account Support Engineer:This was the position I was originally hired for. This position was centered on being intimately familiar with a select list of clients to provide specialized support. Due to general need for talents across customers and support scalability requirements, position was later eneralized to that of the Operations Engineer role.

Network Appliance, Inc. (Rockville, MD) / November 1998 - May 1999

Professional Services Engineer:Provided a range of services to the Network Appliance customer community. Services included: network consultation, analysis and architecture services; system installation, upgrade, repair and optimization. I also provided pre-sales support on an as-needed basis.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. - Cray Research Division (Chantilly, VA) / January 1997 - November 1998

Technical Analyst (Americas Group):Hired to act as a Senior Field Engineer to provide hardware and software support to local field engineers and to handle problem escalations for high profile clients. Position required me to have demonstrable expertise in almost the entire SGI product line, particularly high end systems. This included extensive work with SGI's: Origin family of systems in configurations from 32 to 128 processors, the Challenge family of servers, SCSI and Fibre RAID, Logical volume management, SCSI and Fibre JBOD, HIPPI networking, and network services and interoperability applications (Sendmail, BIND, DNS, YP/FNS, NFS/PCNFS, Samba and printing) and the Fail Safe High Availability product. In addition, I gained extensive experience in system tuning, IRIX internals, dump analysis and porting of freeware to the SGI platform (e.g., Apache and add-on modules; sendmail, with virtual user and anti-spamming options; BIND, including versions 4.9.x and 8.1.x; Tcl/Tk, etc.). My support position also required me to know all versions of IRIX from 5.3 through 6.5.

Regional Support Engineer/Technical Analyst:The Regional Support Engineers were eventually made Technical Analysts - I was assigned to the Americas Group. This was done to better accommodate increasing specialization of the previously Regional Engineers. Assignments changed from primarily Atlantic region to all of US, Canada and Mexico

Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions (Reston, VA) / November 1995 - January 1997

Systems Administrator (III):Was charged with the installation and maintenance of a heterogeneous development environment for the Applications and Web Hosting Development groups. Platforms include SGI Indy workstations and Challenge servers, Sun SPARCstation 20's and SPAR Server 1000's, Microsoft NT workstations and Power Macintosh workstations, and network peripherals (color and b&w printers, scanners, RAIDS and tape backup systems.) Network software includes: Samba and Xinet products (for integration of NT and Macintosh resources); Netscape and Apache HTTPd's; NIS and NFS for sharing of Unix resources among servers and workstations; Sendmail and Popper to provide work group Internet mail functionality; DNS services; Development software installed includes: SGI and Sun C/C++ visual developer products; SGI's Cosmo suite; Alias/Wavefront's WebAnimator. General administrative tools include: Sun's Admintool for Solaris; SGI's workstation administration tools; Veritas's and SGI's Logical Volume Management systems (VxFS/VxVM and XLV, respectively) Netscape AdmServ for management of Netscape WebServer; HP JetAdmin and Unix lpadmin for creation and maintenance of Solaris, network print server; personally created administrative tools.

Systems Design:Originally hired to act as internal consultant. Primary duties included research for product acquisition, technical consultation on acquisition contract talks and internal product development.

Alternative Resources Corporation (Arlington, VA) / May 1994 - November 1995

LAN Administration:Provided LAN administration services to several clients. Administered Novell, Banyan Vines, AppleTalk and Windows for Workgroup based LANs. Administered a LAN attached to a centrally administered WAN. Performed software installs, upgrades and configuration. Installed, configured and serviced LAN attached hardware. Performed daily backups. Acted as service liaison between local office personnel and corporate IT groups. Created a security policy draft for protection of IT assets. Handled pricing and ordering of supplies.

Technical Support:Worked on telephone help desks to provide customer assistance and instruction, trouble ticket routing and technician dispatch services.

PDN Monitoring:Worked for an international long distance voice/data carrier to monitor the functioning of their X.25 and X.400 international data networks.

Legislative Information Systems (Annandale, VA) / May 1994 - November 1995

Electronic Document Editing/Publishing:Used of Federal Register to create HyperText infobases for DOS, Windows and Macintosh environments. Raw documents were produced via lexical analyzer software. My task was to correct the work done by the automated tools.

Technical Support:Provided telephone, FAX and other support services to help users of infobase packages to install, update, use and solve problems associated with their packages. I also performed Novell workstation setup tasks including software, NIC and cabling installation, and telephone closet work.

Database Administration:Used FoxPro for Windows and in-house Clipper programs to generate databases used for the creation of the Hypertext infobases.

Friends & Co. (Arlington, VA) / February 1993 - April 1994

Desktop Support:Provided software installation and upgrade services for several clients. Specifically:

  • Macintosh: Upgraded operating systems to System 7.x and installed/upgraded Lotus 1-2-3, MS Word and PageMaker
  • DOS: Installed/upgraded operating systems to DOS 5.1 and DOS 6.x, installed WordPerfect 5.1 and ProComm Plus
  • Windows: Installed Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups, Lotus 1-2-3 v.4, Excel 5.0, MS Word, WordPerfect 5.2 and 6.0 , Harvard Graphics, CorelDRAW! and PhotoShop 3.x and 4.x

Data Recovery:Recovered SAS data files lost when filesystem was damaged during a client's operating system upgrade.

Telephone Assistance:Set up and configured a dBase call tracking database to handle logging and directing of client inquiries. Helped to troubleshoot problems and teach users more powerful uses of Macintosh, DOS and Windows programs (see above section for applications.)

Desktop Publishing:Worked a couple of contracts for FAA and US Army helping edit and prepare text and graphics for computer networking proposals.

Computer Skills:

Operating Systems:

Solaris 2.4, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 7, 8 and 9

  • Administration for Web hosting Service
  • Performance Tuning/Optimization
  • Security Administration
  • Performance Tuning/Optimization
  • Software Porting and Package Creation

AIX 5.x

  • Installation/configuration of Veritas Volume Manager and Filesystem
  • Installation/configuration of Veritas Cluster Server
  • Installation/configuration of Veritas Volume Replicator
  • Installation/configuration of Oracle 9i RAC+VCS
  • Installation/configuration of Veritas Global Cluster Option

HP/UX 11i

  • Installation/configuration of Veritas Volume Manager and Filesystem
  • Installation/configuration of Veritas Cluster Server

IRIX 5.3, 6.2

  • Administration for ISP
  • Security Administration
  • Performance Tuning/Optimization

IRIX 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5

  • Provided Support while working for OS vendor
  • Kernel Internals
  • Crash Dump Analysis
  • OS Software Debugging (IRIX 6.5 Alpha and Beta)
  • Performance Tuning/Optimization

Software:

  • Veritas Cluster Server
  • SunCluster 3.x
  • SGI FailSafe
/
  • Veritas Volume Manager
  • Veritas Volume Replicator
  • Veritas File System
  • Flash Snap
  • Sun Volume Manager
  • SGI "XLV" Volume Manager
  • SGI "XFS" File System
/
  • Brocade Fabric Manager
  • Clariion Navisphere
  • MTI MSM and GLAD Manager
  • NetApp Data OnTap

  • IP Filter
  • SunScreen
  • SGI Gauntlet Firewall
/
  • Apache (1.3.x and 2.x)
  • Netscape/iPlanet/SunOne Web Servers
  • Sendmail (8.6.12 - 8.12.x)
  • Postfix
  • MySQL
/
  • BIND 4.x, 8.x and 9.x
  • NIS/YP and NIS+
  • Netscape/Sun and OpenLDAP LDAP Servers

Hardware:

  • SunFire 12000/15000
  • SunFire V-series
  • SF3800/SF4800/SF6800
  • E3500/4500/5500/6500
  • E250/E450
  • Netra T and X-series
  • Ultra I/II
  • Ultra 5/10/30/60/80
  • E1000
/
  • Origin 2000 (16P - 256P)
  • Origin 200
  • Onyx 2
  • Octane
  • Challenge XL/L/M/DM
  • Onyx
/
  • MTI S200
  • MTI 3500/3600
  • MTI 3200
  • Sun A1000/D1000
  • Sun A5200
  • Sun T3/3510
  • Sun/HDS 9960
  • Clariion Arrays
  • SGI “Vault”

Networking:

  • Ethernet
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • Fibre Channel (DAS/SAN)
  • FDDI
  • ATM
  • HIPPI
/
  • Cisco switches & routers
  • Foundry switches
  • Livingston PortMaster RAS

Professional Training:

  • Veritas Cluster Server (Basic and Advanced) Administration
  • Veritas Volume Manager (Basic and Advanced) Administration
  • Sun Fault Analysis
  • Sun Cluster Administration
  • Sun/iPlanet Directory Server 4.1 Administration
  • Sun Enterprise 10000 Administration
  • IBM WebSphere 4.0 Application Server Administration
  • BEA Weblogic 5.1 Application Server Administration
  • ATG Dynamo Commerce Server 5.0 Administration
  • NetApp Filer Administration
  • NetApp Filer High Availability
  • DataGeneral Advanced FibreChannel Diagnostics
  • Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 Hardware Maintenance
  • Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.5 Fault Analysis, Internals and Performance Tuning
  • Silicon Graphics FailSafe Administration
  • Silicon Graphics Scalable Storage Solutions (SCSI and FibreChannel)

Professional Ceritification:

  • SCSA Solaris 2.6, 7 and 8
  • SCNA Solaris 7 and 8

Education:

PennsylvaniaStateUniversity (University Park, PA) / September 1988 - December 1992

Bachelor of Science in Psychology (Minor in Computer Science): concentrations in: calculus, statistics and technical writing. Degree conferred December 1992