Solution Architect
ABSA Group Ltd
مجموع سنوات الخبرة :29 years, 7 أشهر
Contract Position
•Delivered end-to-end infrastructure designs which are consistent, simple and effective.
•Full responsibility to ensure the end-to-end infrastructure designs of a complex and critical nature to meet the business requirements within the project's budget.
•Complying with relevant strategy and policy, making use of applicable patterns and standard building blocks provided by core engineering.
•Work with Project Manager(s) to review, when necessary revise, cost and risk analysis.
•Working with Core Engineering, Application Architects and Group Technology to understand and influence changes in architecture policies and strategy.
•Create and maintain necessary capability, knowledge and skills to deliver Infrastructure Designs.
•Create the required Infrastructure designs of Business Unit E2E solution designs in the Global Demand and Estimation tools.
•Analyze effectiveness of processes and systems in use in the infrastructure design specifications and make recommendations for improvements.
•Keep abreast of industry and business unit changes by attending regular training, conferences, forums, reading and engagement with subject matter experts and industry peers.
•Stay abreast of industry and operational trends and ensure that infrastructure design is well positioned to provide competitive and industry leading services.
•Contribute to the development of the team members by sharing best practices and specialist knowledge.
•Challenge the established practices and recommend improvements to continuously enhance and improve infrastructure design within the Bank.
•Define and Champion the use of Technical Standards, Procedures and Best Practice.
•Expand and maintain networks with Infrastructure Services GTIS Africa as well as Barclays global Engineering stakeholders and role players.
•Build and foster relationships with colleagues and business stakeholders and role players in order to improve overall effectiveness.
•Position the infrastructure team favourably with all relevant internal stakeholders and colleagues.
•Attend to role players, stakeholders and customer service requests, inquiries and complaints.
•Ensure that processes, control requirements and risk management frameworks that impact the area are documented and understood by all members of the team.
•Policies/initiatives/projects/plans to ensure fair coverage, protection of the bank’s reputation and income and the overall sustainability of the bank.
•Own and agree corrective action items with management for findings related to the functional area.
•Complete required compliance and SOX attestations and ensure that impacted team members complete their attestations.
•Adhere to and understand own responsibilities in terms of all compliance requirements and call for the area's Compliance Officer to conduct briefing sessions if gaps are identified.
Achievements:
Migrated Falcon Fraud Management (FICO) from Barcalys UK to ABSA South Africa. Design Solution and infrastructure for Card Payments (HPS), ATM, POS, Acquirer, Issuer. Designed Pay African Payments. Amendments to Barclays Enterprise Middleware (BEM) and Barclays Operations Client (BOS) infrastructure design. Delivered Splunk Migration Infrastructures for South Africa and the rest of Africa.From
Permanent Position
•Technical lead on several consultancy projects at Telkom, National Health Laboratory System (NHLS) and Road Accident Fund (RAF).
•End-to-end implementation of systems including assessment, detailed design, implementation, hand-over and support.
•Strategy planning for IT and business clients which includes hardware purchases and upgrades as well as software requirements.
•Performing gap analysis of computer systems, identifying gaps in existing hardware and software infrastructure.
•Tender review including review of current systems and future requirements followed by a design in line with tender prerequisites.
•Maintaining project targets, resource planning and scheduling.
•Writing ad-hoc C-code (with POSIX system calls) and scripts (shell and perl) in order to collect capacity and performance data, and wrap shell scripts with C-code.
•Analysing XP20Ks storage performance and generating reports on I/O performance, I/O queues cache heat rates, fibre channel throughput and bandwidth
•Server designs for multiple rack arrangements to be used stand-alone or with virtualization including configuration with Red Hat and Oracle.
•Upgrading and maintaining existing virtual machines.
•Designing a Data and Disaster Recovery Centre (DC and DRC) with 20 servers, meeting recovery time and recovery point objectives.
•Installing, configuring and tuning Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.X and 6.X operating systems.
•Preparing detailed designs for NGNEC (Telkom’s mobile system) and TIM Cramer systems and clusters.
•Installing, configuring and tuning SuSE 10.X 11.X Operating Systems, building HP Service Guard Clusters (SGLX A.11.20.20) for Oracle 11gr2, with RHEL 5.7 and SAP/R3 with SuSE 11 SP2.
Achievements:
Implemented Telkom NGNEC and TIM Cramer systems on RHEL 5.7 with HP Service Guard (on more than 100 servers and six clusters). Created base line performance reports (with iozone, nmon and netperf). Environment was based on AMDOCS design with clustered Oracle servers, Apache, WebLogic, Tomcat, JBoss web environment. The hardware platforms were HP Blades and DL980 servers with EMC Vmax storage. This solution included a grid (6 nodes) for SAS Visual 9.1 with Hadoop, on HP Blades. Designed and implemented a large number of well-balanced servers/blades and storage environments, mainly SAN, with provisioning. As well as support, designed and implemented Oracle 11g RAC, ASM, DC and DRC with HP CA and Oracle Data Guard. NHLS upgrade design and implementation; 3xc7000 enclosure with 15 BL860c with VC and 1 BL890c i2, EVA8400, SAN. Production and Disaster Recovery (DR is a replica of production). Systems included Oracle 10g, ASM, RAC with EBS, CDW and TrakLab.
(Gauteng Shared Services Centre) DC/DRC consolidation assessment and design for their IT server farm consisting of 420 Intel based servers.
•Fuel Group IT consolidation and virtualization assessment, design and technical project replacement of HP-UX with IBM AIX servers including clustering and DR solutions.
•RSA Government Transport Department (e-Natis) HP hardware and software assessment and design with Oracle RAC.
•Department of Justice (DOJ) Computer systems hardware system design for DC and DRC which included 510 database servers. Contributed to preparation of Request for Proposal (RFP).
•Designed and implemented Autopage Cellular DR solution.
Achievements:
Designed and implemented a large number of well-balanced servers and storage environments (SAN) with provisioning, Oracle 10gr2 RAC, ASM, DC and DRC. Designed IT solution for managing payments for DOJ, with SQL, SAP/R3 high end storage and servers (XP24000, HP Integrity SuperDomes). Planned Proof of Concept (POC) based on HP infrastructure (rx8640 and XP20k) to compete against IBM infrastructure (p570 and DS8100). Created storage load tests and presented performance results. Prepared solution proposals and presentation.
Lead on Telkom Flexible Billing Project, Centurion and Bellville, RSA, managing 4 System Storage Administrators.
•IT strategy planning and assessment of their systems configuration in preparation for upgrades.
•Collected capacity and performance data (CPU, memory, I/O and network utilisation) from the existing systems (82 servers) with appropriate utilities and tools (CFG2 HTML, HP PerfView), analysed the collected data, compiled reports and recommendations, and designed server consolidation based on the findings.
•Wrote ad-hoc C-code (with POSIX system calls) and scripts in order to collect capacity and performance data
•Designed and implemented the work load plan using HP Work Load Manager on the consolidated environment.
•Gave training courses for the HP Education Centre in Johannesburg, Dubai and Riyadh. Courses included Advanced LVM and MirrorDisk/UX; Hands on MC/Service Guard; Performance Tuning; HP-UX Troubleshooting; HP-UX Security; and HP-UX System Administration 1; and HP-UX System Administration 2.
•Designed and implemented a consolidated server environment (4 SuperDome complexes) with 55 servers based on the assessment of the existing 82 serves.
•Designed and implemented a High Availability (HA) solution with MC/ServiceGuard and EMC DMX 3 storages.
•Designed and implemented data migration from the live to the consolidated environment.
•Designed and assisted with the technical “cut over” process.
•Designed a backup solution for flexible billing with HP Data Protector 5.5, Zero Downtime Backup (ZDB) and Clarion Disk Library.
Achievements:
Installed 55 servers, at Telkom in Bellville and Centurion, in two SuperDome complexes, with the required nPars and vPars. Capacity planning and performance tuning in order to design the workload management for the consolidated flexible billing servers. Wrote performance reports including executive summaries. Balanced I/O via FC-HBAs.
Permanent Position
•Designed and implemented computerised stock taking of alcoholic beverages system identifying of items by barcodes using barcode scanners and scales.
•Created database schemas in MySQL and GUI interfacing with MySQL C-API.
Achievements:
Worked on a brand new stock taking system for bars, restaurants and fast food chains.
16 Month Contract
•Technical leader of the implementation of UNIX HP-UX and Solaris servers.
•Vendor relationship management including meetings with vendors discussing storage server services and negotiation of better offers for Saudi Telecommunications Company (STC).
•DR System design for STC covering HP-UX, AIX & SUN Solaris systems.
•Performed risk analysis to identify existing weaknesses in server designs, and created alternative solutions to mitigate these risks.
•Collected configuration, capacity and performance data (CPU, memory, I/O and network utilisation) from their existing DC systems with appropriate utilities and tools, analysed the collected information, compiled reports and recommendations, and designed the Disaster Recovery DC based on the findings.
•Wrote ad-hoc C-code (with POSIX system calls) and scripts in order to collect capacity, configuration and performance data.
•Consolidation of HP servers onto HP Superdome MC/SG Cluster Consolidation of IBM servers onto IBM p670 DLPARs and LPARs.
•Created backup system design utilising Veritas NetBackup.
•Achievements:
Provided an end-to-end DR solution (from assessment, to design and implementation), which reduced STC’s recovery time (if disaster strikes) from 6 months to 16 hours, reducing the estimated potential financial loss from ZAR10 billion to ZAR40 million.
Permanent Position
•Overall responsibilities as a
Leader for 4th line support for HP-UX systems, C/C++/Fortran programming support, and pre-sales support.
•Customer relationship management.
•Performance engineering and capacity planning for RDBMS, various applications and OS.
•Teaching numerous training courses in the HP Education, manage escalations, analyse core dumps, technical lead.
•Collected capacity and performance data (CPU, memory, I/O and network utilisation) from the client servers with appropriate utilities and tools, analysed the collected information, complied reports and recommendations based on the findings. Operating system tuning according to the applications’ requirements and loads.
•Achievements:
•Designed and developed (in C) a utility in order to control SENTRY 10KVA UPSes via HP-UX server’s parallel port and developed a C-utility to stripe between LVM disks (prior 10.X). Prepared a feasibility report based on LaserRx/PerfRx/Perfview generated outputs, install and configure DataPair, SwitchOver and MC/ServiceGuard (numerous) solutions.
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