See the breadth.
Understand the depth.

From infrastructure to coherence

Compute, networking, storage and management are interconnected. Understanding the chain helps me review designs, isolate issues and support sound decisions.

Networking as a connecting discipline

Networking is one of my strongest disciplines. I examine switching, routing, VLANs, redundancy and the connections between compute, storage and sites. The focus is the full traffic flow: what needs to communicate, which paths it uses and what happens when a component fails.

That knowledge supports datacenter design and investigation of issues visible at another layer. DNS, firewalling, certificates and management component dependencies can also determine how the overall platform behaves.

VMware and storage together

My platform experience includes vSphere, VCF, vSAN ESA and stretched designs, with NSX and load balancing as related components. I look at workload placement, failure domains, capacity and the consequences of design decisions for operations and lifecycle.

On the storage side, I have experience with NetApp ONTAP, StorageGRID and Pure. The starting point is the workload: required performance, availability and recoverability, and what those requirements mean for networking, storage policies and operations.

Automation with an operational purpose

I work with Ansible, AWX/AAP, Terraform and Packer to make deployment and operations repeatable. Tools support the process. The desired workflow, inputs, checks and failure behaviour need to be understood first.

Automation also needs to be transferable. I pay attention to readability, logging, permissions and how a team can safely execute or change a process. This makes automation part of a maintainable platform rather than another unmanaged dependency.

Foundation services matter

AD, DNS, DHCP, PKI, SQL high availability, monitoring and patching are often outside the platform diagram, yet many components rely on them. I include them in reviews, migration planning and incident investigation.

My breadth is particularly useful when a question spans multiple disciplines. I establish the dependencies and develop the relevant detail, involving specialists where needed.