CURRICULUM VITAE

Mike Hendon

 
 

Personal Details

E-mail:mike@southnet.co.uk
Address:44 Watson Way, Basingstoke, Hampshire. RG23 8AN
DOB:25th September 1979
Phone:+44 (0) 7876 396 801
Current Position:Senior Systems Engineer
Personal Skills:Good team player with strong communication skills
Technical lead with experience of mentoring staff
Ability to work under pressure within deadlines
Work Summary:I have a total of 15 years experience in the IT industry of which 7 years were in the banking sector (Reuters & Nomura) where I supported 1000+ mission critical servers (out of an environment of 4500+ servers) including trading systems (equities, etc...) on a 24/7 basis, where the right diagnosis of a problem and subsequent fix is required as fast as possible.
My experience covers designing, installing and maintaining critical infrastructures and SAN environments as well as managing the infrastructure and recommending methods for reducing risk and improving availability and reliability.
Tuning new and existing installations to eliminate bottlenecks ranging from software (OS/DB) to hardware (memory, network and SAN etc…).
 
 

Technical Skills

Linux:RedHat (to RHEL 7.2), Fedora & CentOS Administration.
Virtual:VMware ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, VirtualBox
Sun(OS):Solaris 8-11 Installation & Administration.
Microsoft:Windows (Desktop to 10 and Server to 2012), AD & Remote Access / VPN
Cluster:Oracle Solaris Cluster to 4, Veritas Cluster (VCS) to 6
Veritas:Netbackup, Disaster recovery, VxVM & VxFS
Storage Tools:Veritas Volume Manager, ODS/Solstice Disk Suite/SVM, QFS, ZFS.
Networking:TCP/IP, Firewall, Router configuration, Intranets, Extranets, Remote access, DNS (Bind/gdnsd), DHCP, NIS, NFS, Samba, Wireless 802.11a/b/g/n, LDAP
Sendmail:Installation and configuration.
Shell scripting:Bash, Ksh, etc...
Office:StarOffice, MS Office.
Security/Audit:SSH, VPN, AIDE, sudo, RBAC, Kerberos
Monitoring:BMC Patrol, Quest Foglight, syslog-ng, Nagios, Splunk
Service Desk:BMC Remedy 7-8, Jira, Bugzilla
Automation:Puppet
 
 

Work Profile

Period:

July 2013 –

Company:

SamKnows (via Southnet Ltd 2013-2015), United Kingdom

Position:Unix/Linux Consultant (2013-2015)/Senior Systems Engineer (2015-)
  Project work - including:
  • Implementation of Puppet across the global estate
  • Setting up Nagios and integrating it with Puppet for reliable deployment and monitoring
  • Using RRDtool to help analyse performance
  • Setting up LDAP/Kerberos
  • Enhancing reliability with DNS based failover using gdnsd
BAU:
  • Maintain 500+ servers globally
  • Liaise with partners and datacenters for server upgrades, additions, and decommissions
  • Fault finding across a complex environment
 
Period:

January 2011 – June 2013

Company:

Nomura (via Southnet Ltd), United Kingdom

Position:Unix/Linux Consultant
  BAU and on-call responsibility for:
  • over 4500 linux and solaris servers in the EU
  • a large multi-site VMware estate
  • several VCS clusters
  • global DNS infrastructure
  • Kerberos
  • NIS
  • Team and procedural documentation on the site Twiki
  • Mentoring interns and graduate new team members
Project work included
  • Migrating services to new datacenters where most services went onto new hardware and any servers that were physically moved were upgraded to the new Global Build
  • Migrating servers to upgraded storage with minimal downtime and often with no reboots required
  • Various remediation works across several weekends as issues were identified and fixes put into place, again with minimal downtime
  • Coordinating and conducting DR tests for the business units
  • Assisted Engineering in the specification, architecture, and deployment of multiple system integration initiatives, including direct responsibility for engineering parts of several solutions
 
Period:

April 2010 – September 2010

Company:

Monitise Group Ltd (via Southnet Ltd), United Kingdom

Position:Solaris Consultant
 Designed and implemented a new backup solution based on Symantec Netbackup and using LTO5 drives for speed and native encryption.
Migrated several standalone systems to a new corporate cluster to increase reliability
 
Period:

July 2009 – January 2010

Company:

Rank Interactive/Blue Square (via Southnet Ltd), United Kingdom

Position:Solaris Consultant
 Created a custom JET wrapper to rebuild the various datacenters including the separation of PCI and non-PCI environments, including Sun Cluster 3.2u2, automated LDOM and zone installs.
Implemented a role based access control (RBAC) policy.
Migration from NIS to LDAP.
System auditing, including the installation and configuration of AIDE.
 
Period:

July 2009

Company:

MTN (via Southnet Ltd), Ivory Coast

Position:Solaris Consultant
 Added fibre cards to the primary M9000 ensuring resilient multipathing to the SAN.
Reconfigured the SAN for performance which resulted in a huge increase in throughput of just short of 8 times the original.
 
Period:

August 2008 – June 2009

Company:

EDS (via Southnet Ltd), United Kingdom

Position:Solaris Consultant
 Implemented a custom JET wrapper to build a new production environment, including Sun Cluster and zones.
Assisted with the migration to the new production environment.
Created a JET wrapper to build RAC (10.2.0.4) on Sun Cluster in under 4 hours - from initial system boot to a database running under RAC.
Involved in various projects in all stages from design, writing the code, peer review, implementation and support.
Live upgrade of existing servers either to a newer Solaris release or patch cluster.
Setup 2 Oracle RAC clusters across 2 M8000s on the primary site and a RAC cluster on the DR M8000
 
Period:

May 2008 – August 2008

Company:

UCAS (via Southnet Ltd), United Kingdom

Position:Solaris Consultant
 Migration of the existing high traffic websites to a highly available configuration on new servers whilst changing the underlying configuration.
Preparing kit for DR and running DR tests.
Configuration of Netbackup to cope the newly purchased VTL setup.
Prepared reports showing the current patch levels of all the servers and the main security and other issues.
 
Period:

April 2008 – May 2008

Company:

Capgemini (via Southnet Ltd), United Kingdom

Position:Solaris Consultant
 Reviewed the existing production environment for security and operational issues.
Built a Pre Production ITSM (BMC Remedy) environment to mirror the existing Production environment.
Moved the pre-prod environment into a clustered configuration.
After testing, reconfigured the production environment as a cluster, providing resilience to the end users.
Period:

June 2007 – April 2008

Company:

Kwari Ltd, United Kingdom

Position:Senior Unix Systems Administrator and Infrastructure Architect
 I was responsible for the detailed design, implementation and support with the primary goal of High Availability whilst being secure to PCI (Payment Card Industry) standards.
After some performance tuning we achieved a sustained throughput of 10s of thousands transaction per second – 2 billion transactions per day (sustained).
Day to day work and technologies used:
  • Detailed technical design for all environments, including firewall and networks.
    • The production network is segregated into 6 separate vlans for security and performance.
    • Firewalls implemented as both standalone appliances and host based.
  • Designed and implemented the SAN environments.
  • Physically racked and cabled all of the environments.
    • M5000, T2000s, X2200s, X4200s, v890s & SE6140s.
  • Solaris 10 planning and installation on both Sparc and x86 servers using jumpstart and JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit).
  • RHEL 5 planning and installation on x86 servers using kickstart.
  • Design, installation, configuration and support of Sun Cluster 3.2 with SDS.
    • 2 node Oracle 10g cluster, with 6 separate oracle instances (and all associated resources) – file systems on QFS shared resources.
    • 2 node application cluster, with 4 zones and several related resources per zone – file systems on a separate QFS shared resource.
    • 4 node game engine layer (bespoke application layer cluster on linux)
    • 2 node game front end (bespoke application layer cluster on linux)
    • 2 node tomcat cluster with several tomcats and other 2nd line services.
    • 2 node apache cluster as a front end to the tomcats.
  • Solaris Containers (Zones with Resource Controls)
    • Dev – easy replication of production env on fewer systems.
    • Prod – secure separation of underlying OS and applications
  • Account Security and auditing using Solaris RBAC (Roles).
  • Remote server management, monitoring and backup.
  • Server Auditing using AIDE and syslog-ng.
  • Automated the provisioning of the entire environment
    • Creation of relevant Solaris containers and then system hardening.
    • Creation of application user roles.
    • Adding cluster resources.
    • Installing or upgrading prerequisite packages.
    • Configuration of auditing and system logging.
    • Deploy in house application software.
    • Deployment of new development environments was reduced from 4 days to 10 minutes script execution.
 
Period:

March 2006 – June 2007

Company:

Cable and Wireless (Bulldog), United Kingdom

Position:Senior Unix Systems Administrator
 This position in the highly focused and intimate team involved managing a critical estate of unix boxes, as well as assisting the windows server administrators with some of the more interesting issues.
On call provision was an essential part of the role.
Day to day work and technologies used included:
  • Detailed design for all new environments, working with the Networks team.
  • Solaris planning and installation on both Sparc and x86 servers using jumpstart.
  • Design, installation, configuration and support of all new clusters and SAN infrastructure.
  • Support (and reconfiguration where required) of existing clusters and SAN infrastructure.
  • Account Security and auditing using sudo.
  • Design, installation, configuration and support of BMC Patrol.
  • Implementation of server patching cycle.
  • Security Audit and subsequent hardening of existing infrastructure.
  • Performance tuning of billing platform
  • Planning and executing data centre consolidation as part of an office restructure.
 
Period:

July 2004 – March 2006

Company:

Nomura (via Morse), United Kingdom

Position:Unix Specialist
 My main role was on-site with customers, predominantly within the Finance sector in London, working to identify potential risks that may impact the availability of their systems, ranging from V880s to E10Ks. I also managed the remediation of any issues, working with customers, mentoring new staff and acting as team leader.
This included:-
  • Introduction of Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit (JET) to standardize server builds.
  • Implementation of industry best practices.
  • Installation of Solaris on Sparc and x86.
  • Installation of Sun Cluster 3/3.1 and Veritas Cluster (VCS) 4.1.
  • Software support of large server environments (1000+).
  • Risk assessment and reduction.
  • Performance tuning of trading systems.
 
Period:

May 2002 – July 2004

Company:

Reuters and Nomura via Sun Microsystems Inc., United Kingdom

Position:Associate Site Engineer
 This role was primarily site based with 1 week in 6 spent on-call covering London.
I was based at Reuters then moved to Nomura as the on-site hardware team leader.
Day to day work and technologies used included:-
  • Building and installation of high-end servers (up to SF15K).
  • Installation of Solaris on Sparc and x86 to customer specifications.
  • Installation of VxVM, VxFS and SDS to customer specifications.
  • Installation of Sun Cluster 3.
  • Troubleshooting major escalations
  • Proactive site assessments and assessing single points of failure.
  • Implementation of Best Practices and assisting with planning patch cycles.
  • Hardware and OS support of large server environments (1000+)
 
Period:

Dec 2000 – May 2002

Company:

Sun Microsystems Inc., United Kingdom

Position:Support Hub Engineer
 Working in the Support Hub as part of a large team of 50 engineers, I was responsible for resolving customer issues in a timely manner and escalating bugs to 3rd line support. This included:-
  • Primary lead for networking, sendmail and apache issues.
  • 1st line technical support as part of a rota
  • Mentored new starters
  • Team leader (as part of a rota)
  • Mission Critical cover on weekend rota.
 
 

Education

A LevelsBlundells School, Tiverton, Devon
  • Mathematics
  • Physics
  • Chemistry
GCSEsBlundells School, Tiverton, Devon
  • 11 subjects
 
 

Leisure Interests

 
  • Computing: Home networking, web hosting, keeping up-to-date with the latest technology
  • DIY
  • Reading
  • Swimming
 
 

References

 Available on request