Paul Aston

Background

About Paul Aston

Short: I like computers! Long: I support and manage enterprise storage environments, data centres, and the Windows Server / Open Systems estate of a leading global finance company. In Storage, I provide day-to-day operations for various environments, fail-over planning and testing, capacity management, backups, clones, synchronous replication and commissioning/upgrading/decommissioning of various vendor SAN storage arrays. In Open Systems, I'm an OpenVMS system administrator with over 10 years of user experience and 3 years of administration experience. I manage bespoke cross-site Alpha and Itanium clusters with up-times of over 15 years each. Previous role gives me both business and technical perspectives on maintaining continuous availability. I manage multiple data centres of different footprints across the UK and EMEA, provide hands-on and remote support/management and can install/configure/decommission any device - LAN/SAN routers/switches/gateways/firewalls, all rackmount server/chassis systems etc. Data centre capacity management/planning, power management/inventory, remote power operation, and floor works - physical rack prep/install/decommission. Cabling - enforcing standards/labelling/logical inventory, structured cabling works, termination, fibre splicing, able to use OTDR/toners/testers, I have basic physical VoIP/telephony knowledge. I have implemented 10+ data circuits and I am fairly fluent in "Telco language". Server support role is fairly new but I will learn Azure, Nutanix, Active Directory and related domain infrastructure in full. Mainly self-learned Windows and Linux since age 8, I am a Red Hat Certified System Administrator and fluent in all Windows Client and Server operating systems. I have intermediate knowledge of domain/large scale administration. I'm fairly skilled at Excel, and can code "well enough" in DCL/Powershell/bash/anything really. I have a home lab and like to test things out myself in my spare time. So, I like computers!