Data Centre Engineer

• Aug 1998 - Present

Having completed my law degree and the legal practice course I left Chester College of Law in the summer of 1998 and joined a small Insurance company in Rotherham called Direct Group as a temp, putting cover booklets in envelopes and doing general office admin work whilst looking for a law contract. An opportunity arose to join the IT department (consisted of 2 people, including me) and I have been at Direct Group ever since. In my time at Direct Group I have developed a number of web based systems for clients and also for in-house use. In 2007 I developed a web based claims system capable of logging Property, Travel and Liability claims, this system is still used by Direct Group today, and has to-date logged over 300,000 claims. I also created and programmed the Direct Group helpdesk system, which also integrates with Active Directory and WMI to give a full view of the infrastructure and enables problems to be pro actively fixed before they become service affecting issues (ie disk space / cpu usage monitoring). Day to day duties include the following: - Maintaining the Microsoft estate of around 200 servers. - Looking after Hyper-V clusters and VMWare environments - Using Trilead and Veeam to ensure VM backup strategies are met. - Deploying / configuring Clearswift web and email appliances - Deploying / configuring Sonicwall firewalls and VPNS - Deploying / configuring Juniper VPNs (with access tokens) - SQL database management (2000/2005/2008,2012 and 2014) - Administering and configuring Equallogic SANs - Programming network switches (Dell Powerconnect and Force10) - Maintain and Testing of DR strategies Show less