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Joshua E. Penix

Director, System Engineering

Professional Summary

  • Experienced manager of operations teams with the technical proficiency necessary to understand the systems being supported and credibly lead others to achieve company objectives.
  • Sixteen years as a systems administration professional with roles in large-scale corporate IT as well as consulting for small, medium and enterprise-sized businesses.
  • Confident leading projects involving diverse people and technologies and establishing a clear path toward success.
  • I excel at teaching others, write clear and concise documentation, have good interpersonal skills, and can easily communicate in non-technical terms when necessary.

Technical Skills

Servers and Infrastructure

Proficient in VMware Infrastructure, VMware vCloud Director, VMware VDI, Citrix XenServer, TCP/IP routing and switching and F5 BIG-IP LTM. Familiar with EMC and Compellent SANs, NFS and NetApp NAS, Cisco IOS.

Software and Tools

Proficient in Load balanced LAMP and Java J2EE web stacks, DNS and BIND, UNIX mail servers, MySQL. Familiar with Chef, Git, Vagrant, Packer, Bash scripting, Kickstart deployment, Capacity Management, SNMP, Zabbix, other monitoring and metrics tools.

Operating Systems

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu, Windows Server, Mac OS X, Solaris

Work Experience

Mar 2014Present

Director, System Engineering

ACTIVE Network
  • Through effective hiring and knowledge transfer, collapsed several support silos into a single team capable of supporting not just platform components but many of Active’s customer-facing applications as well. Result was significant relief of individual on-call burden and improved incident response time, including collaboration with colleagues in China for 24/7 coverage.
  • Pushed adoption of Infrastructure as Code methods into Active's Tier 1 products.  Worked in parallel with in-house VMware technical team to shape development of internal cloud architecture based on VMware vCloud Automation Center (vRealize) and NSX software-defined network.
  • Studied Scrum methodology and coached our system engineering teams into applying "Scrum for Ops" for improved project and task deliverable quality and timeline predictability.
Jan 2012Mar 2014

Manager, Technology Operations

ACTIVE Network
  • Managed production operations team responsible for uptime and support of foundational software platform components, such as the PCI Level 1 payment system, shared across multiple customer-facing SaaS products.
  • Led effort to migrate flagship ActiveWorks product from legacy Solaris hardware systems to fully virtualized and scalable Linux infrastructure. Collaborated with development, QA, and software release teams and leveraged automation tools such as Chef to ensure consistency and quality of new environment. Upon go-live, new environment represented a greater than tenfold increase in capacity over the old system.
Oct 2010Jan 2012

Senior Services Consultant (Virtualization and Cloud Strategy)

CA Technologies
  • Led deployment of VMware vCloud Director environment at educational institution. Built workflow for roll-out of test and QA environments that helped reduce IT response time to developer requests from weeks to days.
  • Provided VMware vSphere and vCloud knowledge and guidance to team of other vendor consultants as part of private cloud deployment at large financial services firm.
  • Assisted with pilot deployment of VMware View VDI solution for large auto manufacturer. Gathered desktop user requirements, developed use cases, and ensured that the VDI technology was deployed in a manner that eased user acceptance.
  • Served as liaison between VMware infrastructure services team and Hyperformix software services team. I was chosen for this role due to my understanding of both technologies and the business cases that supported capacity management in virtualized environments.
May 2008Oct 2010

Unix Systems Administrator

Sony Online Entertainment
  • Worked as key member of four-person team responsible for administration of ~4000 Linux servers across multiple data centers. Participated in on-call rotation for production systems outages.
  • Architected, deployed and maintained a large Citrix XenServer virtualization cluster that hosted several hundred active internal development systems as VMs and reduced aging hardware maintenance and datacenter power costs.
  • Supported Station platform team through multiple development cycles of Apache+Tomcat based commerce and user account management system that sits at core of all SOE gaming products.
  • Led pilot project to evaluate Oracle VM as a solution for virtualization of Oracle 11g. After successful evaluation, worked closely with DBA team to coordinate the purchase, configuration and deployment of a production-level Oracle VM cluster.
  • Managed MySQL database cluster serving 900GB of historical game and systems performance trend data to key personnel throughout company.
Dec 2000Apr 2008

Network Manager

Project Design Consultants
  • Managed and supported server hardware and software operations at headquarters and two branch offices. Kept IT budget lean by making effective use of virtualization, Linux, and Open Source technology.
  • Consolidated aging servers to VMware Virtual Infrastructure cluster with fully redundant Compellent SAN, effectively doubling existing compute power and providing expansion room necessary for transition to new version of AutoCAD.
  • Replaced undersized Exchange email sever with Oracle Collaboration Suite, improving email availability and adding company-wide communication tools such as web conferencing, instant messaging, and web-based project workspaces.