Objective


IT

professional with 15 years of experience in high pressure SLA driven environments seeks senior and challenging role. Have progressed through the ranks and have broad experience in application packaging, server support, project management, team lead and design role in both NetWare and Windows environments. Experienced in Virtualization and SAN storage methodologies. Seeking a position where I can utilize my broad depth of overall IT experience in demanding, past environments to produce impact on the stability and uptime of a company s mission critical business systems. Have in depth project management experience and in-depth technical knowledge of supporting large scale, mission critical environments.


Summary


Systems engineer, ~Virtualization Engineer ~Team Leadership/Project Management


Employment

October, 2008 -  Present

Independent consultant.
SENIOR NOVELL NETWARE ENGINEER

Engagement consisted of Project management and server support in the integration of 2 large Banking organizations.
Specifically Responsible for building out the file and print services migration of Legacy
TDBank-North and Commerce, in a rigorous managed desktop environment.

Responsible for architectural design input, documentation and cluster creation for the combined organization.
Created, built and tested 3 2 - node NetWare clusters using Proliant DL 580 file servers and MSA 1500 storage subsystems and Brocade Switches in support of Massachusetts, Maine.
High on the priority list was integration of eDIRECTORY trees and then user provisioning, ZSM/ZFD Zen for Servers/Zen for Desktops via IDM attributes

Ability to function in a large Scale Banking environment and with multiple levels of reporting structure and have shown ability to work independently and as part of a team.
Provided end-to-end project documentation, from inception, to design, to final resolution

March, 2007 -  June, 2008
SENIOR OPERATIONS ANALYST

Publicis Groupe purchased multiple advertising organizations. Job entailed supporting multiple advertising Companies, Saatchi and Saatchi, Zenith Opti-media, MS and L and others advertising firms in a centralized IT infrastructure. Job entailed the Project Management aspects of incorporating what were separated, disbursed environments and teams, into 1 combined, supported entity

Responsible for providing 3rd-level operational support, entailing excellent communication and problem solving skills along with project planning and project lead experience.
Responsible for a 21 Terabyte 15 node Novell 6.5 SAN, a 7 Terabye, 10 node Windows SAN and a 3 Terabyte VMARE-ESX 3.5 Virtual Machine SAN.
Act as the Team Lead in Managing eDirectory tree health and all NDS issue and a 21 Terabyte HP EVA 5000 SAN environment, with 1600 NY users and responsibilities include Boston, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rochester and all small satellite remote office locations.
Have saved the company money and downtime during successful recovery of a 21 terabyte cluster.
Implemented VMWare ESX Server to provide mulitple hardware platforms while keeping hardware costs and energy consumption down.
VMARE-ESX SAN and Windows SAN were tied to Active Directory intrastructure from an NTP time and Kerberos point of view. Novell SAN was an eDirectory connected SAN, with some Suse Servers and RedHat Servers involved in the server mix.

Plan, lead and implement small and large scale projects in a large, complex organization
Successful Interaction with multiple project teams, in multiple geographical locations in a large scale, enterprise environment. Led many of the integration efforts of joining what were distinct and separate companies into a common IT infrastructure and model. Provide mentoring to more junior server team members.

Strong technical documentation skills. Gathered system requirements and documenting design specifications in the planning aspects of the project.
Met and communicated with all key stake holders before, after and during the migration project. Was effective in customer interaction in managing customer expectations and meeting deliverables.
Was a principal player in the smooth migration of file and print services from a legacy Saatchi tree to enterprise tree involving the data migration of 7 Terabytes of SAN storage and over 1300 Saatchi users to enterprise environment. The migration of a Saatchi only New York Based only SAN into an enterprise wide directory and corporate, enterprise driven environment involved a great deal of planning and coordination amongst all principals to assure smooth transition of all services with the least possible interruption in user downtime.
Mentor more junior server team members and interact with storage team and application packaging team.

Deliver personal, customer focused and professional focused service.

Work closely with peers in performing troubleshooting and support of Windows and a NetWare, cluster services environment and document and adhere to all departmental and corporate standards

October, 2004 -  March, 2007
Continuum Health Care Partner

Oversaw the migration of a Legacy 4. x/5 .x environment and all associated services, to a more mature NetWare 6.5 cluster environment, providing the latest services and products to end-users in a large health care environment.

Act as a team lead on the project, in leading a group of server engineers who perform both a support role and work on this project.
Wrote extensive project related technical documentation and project plans. Wrote individual sub-project plans, manpower, hardware and cost estimates for individual legs of the project : data migration leg, Group-Wise leg, Zen-Works leg, object migration leg, etc.
Provide technical leadership for the migration of a 12000 mixed Netware 4. x/5 .x environment to Netware 6.5 and eDirectory. Originally a member of the server team and later a member of the Application packaging team.
experienced with providing smooth transition of services without interruption of customer's service.
Supervise transition from legacy IPX printing to NDPS/iPrint, from individual file servers to a SAN/Clustered environment, along with an upgrade in software delivery capabilities for ZenWorks 1.1 to ZenWorks 7.0 and ZAM database and Patchlink.
Ensure that high degree of customer service is maintained during migration.
Helped design tape-backup Tivoli Storage Manager solution for a 5 Terabyte File and Print SAN and a 3 Terabyte GroupWise SAN.

Work closely with the application packaging and desktop teams in design of the iPrint environment to replace legacy printing environment.

Work closely with the application packaging team in installation of Tiered Electronic Distribution on SAN volumes along with installation of AWI and R services and MidTier Services.

Member of a QA team that works in support of business cases, proposed projects and systems requirements over the course of software development - lifecycles.

proven analytical and problem-solving skills to help validate IT processes through careful testing in order to maximize the benefit of business investments in IT initiatives.
Responsible for supporting a 120 file server Windows 2003 Application server farm.
Did installation of ZLM and tested SuSE server for IDM environment. Tested SLES 91011

Work closely with Novell Consulting Services in Designing an Identity Vault solution, coupled with a simultaneous design of a new Zen-Works 6.5 infrastructure and a Windows XP desktop roll-out.
Project Manage the Zen-Works team in terms of time-lines and deliverables and their role with respect to the Server Team.

April, 2004 -  April, 2004
SENIOR NETWARE SERVER ENGINEER

Responsible for server health and maintenance in a NetWare 6.0 cluster environment in a demanding, high profile state agency.
Responsible for Supporting the Windows 2003 Server farm, patch management and tape backups.

Installation and support of a file server environment in Newark NJ, Jersey City and several locations in NYC entails a high degree of experience in maintaining customer satisfaction levels and over 99.9% server uptime.

Install and configure NDPS printing, iPrint, iManager and other Novell products. Manage server recovery tape backup environment and all production support issues.
Have participated in an Identity Management project involving the use of DirXML connectors.
Performed LDIF exports of production environment and staged the lab environment.
Along with Novell Consulting, have configured the NDS to NDS drivers and the NDS to Exchange drivers.

Alexander D. Gonta Page 4

Cont.

February, 2004 -  February, 2004
WEEKEND CITRIX AND TAPE BACKUP SERVER ENGINEER

provide weekend Network and Citrix support for Law firm s associates and partners.

Work completely unsupervised with need to provide high quality support to the firms Attorneys and Senior Partners.
monitor the tape backup environment.
Responded immediately to emergency situations with sensitivity to deadlines and customer needs.
diagnosed causes of systems failures and malfunctions to ensure highest operating efficiency, reliability and quality performance standards.

Work completely independently and without management oversight, with managerial review of end results.

Demonstrate soft skills and knowledge and sensitivity to client needs in a high profile, law firm environment and show considerable customer skills in supporting all users from secretarial staff to senior partners.

October, 2002 -  October, 2004
ACTIVE DIRECTORY MIGRATION SPECIALIST

Responsible for 3 main job functions : a maintaining the health and integrity of the product NDS/NetWare environment.
b Responsible for the migration of the production NetWare environment to Active Directory and Windows 2000.
c Likewise responsible for supporting a custom, in-house LDAP database using IDM connectors that was used to be in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley-Act. This document management LDAP centric database was called EDOCS . Tree has custom schema and use of DirXML/IDM code.
Completed the migration of the Windows NT 4.0 environment combined with 2 separate Novell 5.1 tree environments to a combined, single Active Directory Environment without causing any user downtime. The migration was done with zero downtime or data loss across 120 file servers in a high visibility banking and financial services data environment.

Posses soft skills in customer interaction. Posses ability to handle mid to large projects with minimal guidance. Exceptionally proactive. Have interfaced with various vendors to coordinate resolution to both hardware and software problems. Interfaced with the development staff, database administration group, network operations staff, area support personnel and the users of the applications/systems. Work independently with management review of end results. Produce periodic status reports and take ownership for production issues resolution. Act as third level support engineer for the server team.
Evaluated FastLane, NetIQ and Bindview and ADMT as migration tools.
Responsible for data migration, application migration and e-mail system migration.
Responsible for architecting and designing an AD environment and Domain Controller placement.

Have performed the consolidation of the NDS and NT domain environment to a single Active Directory Target Environment with the least possible downtime and impact to the user community.

Extensive use of Bindview server and ADMT as a method by which to migrate the NT 4.0 domain environment and the NDS environments to the target while maintaining historical SID's and linking the NDS accounts with the migrated NT accounts correctly in the AD target environment. Responsible for the resource migration. Familiar with Group Policy Management via NetIQ's GPA tool.

December, 2002 -  December, 2002
SERVER CONSOLIDATION CONSULTANT

Have performed in a special server consolidation and disk space clean up project.
Main responsibilities include creating queries via Bindview 7.0 in order to identify dead data on servers, duplicated applications and unused applications across the entire enterprise, in an effort to save disk space, man hours and to create a clean ZenWorks environment for the application packaging group.
Create Project detailed project plans and project manage several desktop technicians and technical coordinators to get the clean up accomplished on over 355 servers.
Have allowed the significant savings in man-hours and increased ROI via this server consolidation and clean up project.

Alexander D. Gonta Page 5

January, 2001 -  January, 2001

E-DIRECTORY experience NETWORK DIRECTORY SERVICES ENGINEER
Function as a third level server support NDS engineer in a core team in a mixed NetWare 5.1 and Windows NT environment.
A member of the Directory Services Group that maintains all 88 NetWare 5.1 servers and all Domain Controllers for the NT Application servers.
Assure smooth operation of contingency and backup environments. Responsibilities include NDS health checks of synchronization and routine server maintenance and the health of Directory Services.
Daily responsibilities include file server creation, service packs, maintaining the tape backup environment.
Perform Extensive testing in Laboratory setting prior to production implementation. are involved in migrating from a NDS environment, with mixed replica rings to an eDirectory environment.
Have installed eDIRECTORY on both NetWare 5.1 and Windows 2000 File servers.
Have installed DirXML 1.0 predecessor to IDM and enabled LDAP functionality for file servers.
Have participated in a major upgrade project, along with Novell Consulting Services, that involved evolving Novell s eDirectory to be a global Meta-Directory and Identity Management tree, above and beyond its use on NetWare servers, to create both a single sign on environment and a process workflow environment. The project goals included interconnecting the Lotus Notes Environment, the production NetWare File and Print and ZenWorks environment, the Windows NT 4.0 environment and the Active Directory Environment, along with the Solaris Environment and PeopleSoft Dataabse and the PBX phone switch into an interconnected Identity Management store, all using eDIRECTORY and DirXML connectors.

September,  -  September, 2001
NOVELL TO WINDOWS SERVER MIGRATION ENGINEER

As Duetche Bank Purchased Banker's Trust, it required a team of migration specialists to migrate all data and services from the Novell Banker's Trust Network to the Duetche Bank Windows Network.
Was responsible for migration and consolidation, of NetWare 3.2 Banker s Trust environment into the Deutsche Windows NT 4.0 cluster environment.
used Bind View-EMS console and Frye utilities, along with many custom Perl scripts to collect user mappings and trustee rights along multiple NetWare 3.2 servers. Data was transferred via Robocopy batch jobs and Xcalcs utilities were used to set NTFS permissions on the WinNT cluster shares.

July, 1998 -  July, 
SENIOR NETWARE ENGINEER

Seconded from Verizon Integration Services of Pinnacle Alliance.
Acted in a multi-site and multi-vendor environment.
Planned, coordinated and executed server installations, configuration, maintenance and troubleshooting and repair operations for JP Morgan Business Divisions.
Met Service Level Agreements. Specialized in migration from NetWare 3.12 to NetWare 4.11 while meeting project deadlines, costs and coordinating the integration and desktop teams to assure a smooth migration without any interruption of service to client community.
performed migration of NetWare 4.11 to NetWare 5.1 and e-Directory.
Acted as a team leader and senior technician in the group.
Maintained stable operation of all Novell 4.11 and Windows NT 4.0 file servers, backup and recovery management.
Was responsible for monitoring file server thresholds and providing weekly reporting to management.
Responded immediately to emergency situations with sensitivity to deadlines and customer needs.
diagnosed causes of systems failures and malfunctions to ensure highest operating efficiency, reliability and quality performance standards.
Performed NDS Tree merges of individual single server trees into central Corporate Tree.
Performed routine server maintenance, patching, RomPaqs and virus definition updates.

Alexander D. Gonta Page 6

August, 1997 -  August, 1998
NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR

Designed the environment from scratch. Act as a third level support engineer.
Designed the migration, created budgets, timelines and costs.
Managed the project, equipment purchasing and people to accomplish a smooth and transparent migration.
Dealt directly with line level managers of each business division, in a sales role and convinced them individually of the validity of the project in order to get the project funded.
Negotiated prices and support fees from Compaq reseller.

Received Paine Webber Peer Award for migration of several Retail Servers.
Designed NDS Tree, time synchronization, root partition and partitions in NYC and Lincoln Harbor, NJ.
Accomplished Year 2000 Compliance and Centralized Network Management.
Implemented GroupWise for some departments in place of cc : Mail.
Was a critical path for Y2k compliance prior to company s eventual migration to pure Windows NT network.
Lent stability to critical in-house business applications via placement on new and fault tolerant hardware and movement from old, unstable servers.
Created software delivery method via NAL jobs.
Created a stable server environment and created user confidence in the LAN Services Department.

Received Paine Webber Peer Award.

July, 1995 -  July, 1998
Information Technology Partner

Seconded from Digital Equipment Corporation in Project Enterprise, a Large Scale Project that involved migration from NetWare 3.12 to NetWare 4.10 and Windows NT server.
Was a server team - member in a company-wide, city-wide project across all of CitiCorp Midtown, Downtown and Long Island City locations.
Assignment III : Swiss Bank Corporation, New York, NY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION CONSULTANT
Functioned as a NetWare Administrator and Third Level Support in a 390 file server and 1500 node network.
Chief responsibility included application packaging and writing software distribution scripts of Win-Install 5.0 and NetWare server administration, consolidation and hardware upgrades while company was undergoing migration from NetWare 3.12 to Windows NT 3.51
Was responsible for helping second level support technicians while supporting the trading floor. Applications supported included Rumba and Attachmate, along with MS-Office and Lotus Office suites. In addition, supported calendaring and scheduling software, along with many SQL applications with ODBC dependencies.
Assignment II : JP Morgan Private Banking, New York, NY
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION CONSULTANT provided and was responsible for second level desktop support for a variety of client functions.
Network and local PC software troubleshooting in a NetWare 3.12 and VAX environment. Applications supported :
Reflection, Impact and other SQL-based applications, Rumba and Attachmate Extra for Windows, Microsoft Office Suite, Lotus Office Suite, Adobe Acrobat, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Paradox for Windows, Aldus-Pagemaker.

Assignment I : American Express Bank, Inc New York, NY
NETWORK ADMINISTRATION CONSULTANT
Was part of a LAN downsizing and consolidation project, a NetWare 3.12 to a Windows NT 3.51 migration project and was a member of the design team.

Alexander D. Gonta Page 7

May, 1994 -  May, 1995
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION CONSULTANT

Completed 2 separate projects while at Prudential. First project involved a NetWare 3.12 to NetWare 4.03 migration project. Second project was an OS/2 2.11 to OS/2 Warp 3.0 desktop migration. Environment consisted of OS/2 Comm Manager for OS/2 workstations and Rumba for Windows 3.1 workstations.
Was responsible for creation of an IRMA board network as well creation of a Novell SNA server to service attached 3270 clients.

Education

Training

Vinca Certified NetWare Engineer . 1999
Westcon , New York , NY

Linux Engineer , 2009
New Horizons Learning Center , Iselin , New Jersey
VMWare 3.5 - ESX , Engineer , 2009
New Horizons Learning Center , Iselin , New Jersey


Skills

Networking : Server Creation : NetWare 3.1x/4 x/5. x/6 .x, Windows NT 3.51/4.0/2000/2003 Tape Backup Servers : Cheyenne ArcServe 6.1/6.6 and Backup Exec for NT, Netbackup Services Creations : Good knowledge of Windows protocols DNS, DHCP, WINS, SNMP, SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, HTTPS.
Experience in Clustering and Blade server technologies Supporting Large Windows 2000/2003 Application server farms High level of experience with Active Directory, server installations, server support and designing solutions. VMWare-ESX 3.5 and ESX-3.5i sessions and Citrix 4.5 Application publishing. Windows and NetWare cluster installations and management NAS and SAN technology and file replication Have Planned, evaluated and implemented failover systems for disaster recovery NetWare 4.x to 5.x Migrations NetWare 3.x to Windows NT 4.0 Migrations Netware 5.x to Windows 2000 migrations eDIRECTORY to Active Directory Migrations Creating User Environments : Login Scripts, Print Queues, Accounts and Rights Networks : Ethernet and Token Ring, TCP/IP, FTP, SPX/IPX, NetBios, RAS Familiar with NDS4 NT. Familiar with DirXML/IDM and eDirectory Operating Systems : Windows 2003/2000, Novell 6.x.. VMWare-ESX, Linux/Unix : ~RedHat, Ubuntu, Centos, ~SuSE Applications : Dirxml 1.1a, IDM 2.0, IDM 3.1, Netpro s DS-Analyzer and DS-Expert, BMC Patrol, Patchlink, Bindview RMS, BindviewAdmin, Beyond Compare, DS-Reporter, NetIQ GPA, Netbackup, ArchServe, Numerous Anti-virus, scheduling, e-mail, fax, BMC Patrol, What s UP Gold, Nagios and 3270 emulation programs : Software Delivery Tools : NetWare Application Launcher 2.0/2.5, Novell s ZenWorks 7.0, Install Shield, Administrator Studio 7.0, Hardware : Platforms : Compaq/HP 2500, 3000, 5000, 5500, 6500, DL580 8000, HP servers, Dell 2200, 2300, 4200. Familiar with Blade Servers BL series. IBM xSeries and eSeries. ADIC Scalar 1000, Storage Works MSA 1000 and MSA 1500 Alexander D. Gonta Page 2 Assignment I : Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, NY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION CONSULTANT Provided high profile, highly visible, second level client support for a variety of client functions in a fast-paced, Win3.1 desktop and NetWare 3.12 server environment. Supported Rumba, Attachmate, Anti-Virus Software, Quemm and BlueMax memory Managers. Supported large scale departmental rollouts, moves and standardization projects. Became a member of the Senior Core Team. Managed the Install department and managed process and work assignments for 5 technicians, assigning work and checking volume and quality of work performed. Work well with a wide range of cultures and personalities React quickly and remain calm in the moment of crisis Fluent in Russian Language