About me
How it all began
It started back in 1982. I was in 5th grade math and we had Apple //'s and started learning Applesoft Basic. I went home and told my parents
"I know what I want to do for a living but don't know what area."
Building on the foundation the early years
Taking what I learned over my elementary and high school years. I started doing consulting writing custom programs for various people everything from:
- Point of sale program
- Grade books
- Fuel mileage tracker
- Custom spreadsheets
- Simple games
I also worked at Basic Computer for a couple of years doing Christmas help assembling systems.
The Early Years
As time progressed I switched from Apple to the x86 architecture. I started with MS-Dos 3.3 and worked up from there in to Windows. Played around with basic networking at home. Again started doing more consulting for various industries:
- Medical
- Dental
- Small Business
- Enterprise
Started looking into who to strategically align with.
Becoming an IT Professional
In 1998 thanks to Y2K and my friends at Robert Half Technologies I got my break into the the field professionally. We all know that issue of not having experience but no one would give you a break to gain experience but RHT gave me that shot. I got exposed to numerous technologies over the next several years.
During this period I started looking at virtualization technologies:
- VMware (ESX, GSX, Workstation)
- Virtual PC and Virtual server (Connectix before Microsoft bought them)
Also looked at Linux to gain exposure here.
Currently
Currently my focus is data center and those technologies related:
- Cisco UCS·
- Virtualization Technologies
- Production Storage (Pure, Nimble)
- Veeam
- Immutable storage for Veeam Backups - ObjectFirst
- Containers
- Hyper Converged Solutions - ProxMox and Scale Computing
- Ubiquity networking gear
Education and Certifications
Object First Technical Professional - January 2025
Object First Advanced Technical Professional - January 2025
VMware VCP - Data Center Virtualization 2020
Veeam VMCE Course - August 2020
Sophos Technical Sales and MSP Certified courses – 2018-2019
VCP6 Foundations course - November 2019
Veeam Technical Sales Certified - 2018
CCNA Cloud Certified - July 2019
Cisco Cloud Administration 210-455 course - July 2019
Cisco Cloud Fundamentals 210-451 course – October 2018
Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Infrastructure (DCIDUC) 6.0 course– August 2017
VMWARE VI3 Installation and Configuration – January 2009
XenServer Certified -July – 2008
XenServer Administration Training, – May – 2008
Lefthand Networks SAN iQ Certified – March 2008
CCNA Boot Camp – September 2006
Stark State Technical College - 2001