Cass Snider

443.970.0426

casssnider@gmail.com

For the past five years I have been working on the leading edge of cloud computing.  At VMware I was part of a team that developed the playbook for migrating a production IT department in to the Cloud.  At Edge Web Hosting I am focused on the day to day and future challenges a cloud provider faces.  At MobileDJ, I saw firsthand the opportunities and challenges that cloud computing provides an early stage startup with.

 

Cloud computing requires a wide base of knowledge and I attribute my success in the field to my previous experiences as a system, network and storage engineer.  My extensive history working with backup technologies has also played a large role in being able to navigate the intricacies of backing up and restoring a cloud environment. 

 

Additionally, I have a strong background in product/service offering development.  While working at Dell I was part of a team that developed a new service offering and I am currently developing new product and service offerings for Edge Web Hosting.  My ten years of experience in Silicon Valley- working for an early stage startup, a venture capital company, and an industry leading software company, provide me with a deep understanding of the current business and technical needs of the cloud computing market.

Edge Web Hosting (Cloud Services Engineer) June 2012-Present

EWH was making the transition from web hosting to cloud hosting when I joined. They had built a vCloud Director environment a few months prior to my hire date.  My first three quarters working for them were focused in stabilizing their nine VMware clusters and their half dozen NetApp and EMC systems. During this time I also implemented Commvault to back up their vCloud environment and I automated and/or proceduralized a number of provisioning and migration tasks with vCloud Director and PowerShell. 

 

Once the stabilization initiative was complete, my focus transitioned to future planning.  In addition to upgrading vCloud director and extending the cloud environment to a new west coast data center, I am currently working on development of new products and service offerings.  Chief amongst those is a virtual database (MSSQL and MySQL) offering.  Virtualizing the database is a prerequisite for all manner of DR (VMWare Site Recovery Manager) and Instance Management (providing customers with an on-demand clone of their production environment  for dev/test/stage purposes) offerings.  I am also planning for VMware’s vCloud Application Director and vFabric Suite which will provide EWH’s customers with Active-Active Distance Application Cluster, Cloud Burstable Java and NoSQL offerings.

 

 

VMware (Senior Storage Administrator) 2008-2011

 

For two and a half years I participated in the VMware corporate IT department’s move into the private and federated cloud.  VMware IT is a bleeding edge production environment. In addition to the usual IT functions, the department was tasked with being a showcase and a beta site for the latest in virtualization technology. As well as showcasing VMware products, the environment was also a showcase for the latest hardware and software offerings of EMC, VMware’s parent company.

 

While my position focused on Storage, VMWare discouraged silos of knowledge and I was able to get heavily involved in virtualization and cloud technologies.  My biggest contribution to the team was my knowledge of Storage and Networking.  As the only technician with in-depth knowledge of both technologies, I became a liaison between the two groups; a function that contributed to the success of a number of projects that required migration and replication of large amounts of data over long distances.

 

Duties included - Storage team lead for Exchange DR project (RecoverPoint, Replication Manager and VMware Site Recovery Manager). Datacenter migration via FCIP and StorageVMotion. Clariion to VMAX migration. Celerra to EMC Unified Storage migration (Celerra Replicator). Storage team lead for Avamar and DataDomain implementation and replication project. Storage team lead for VMware View on NetApp project. Clariion design for Exchange, Sharepoint, VMware View and MSSQL. FC routing implementation. On-call for all production storage systems. Developing a Sharepoint site and Wiki for the storage team. Providing support and cross training to junior staff.

 

MobileDJ (IT Architect) 2007-2008

 

MobileDJ was an early stage Silicon Valley startup.  I architected a public cloud architecture for them, leveraging Amazon AWS and Salesforce.com. 

 

Dell Inc. (Design Architect/Enterprise Regional Support Engineer) 2004-20007

 

While working for Dell I participated in the development of a SAN Health Check service offering.  Working on this project resulted in my promotion to Design Architect.

 

Design Architect duties included: Post sale design of EMC Clariions, Brocade and McData switches. Daily design calls with customers to determine current needs and expectations of future growth. Delivering detailed design workbooks for implementation by Dell’s onsite engineers. Designing Storage systems in small to medium (2-35 hosts) environments including- Exchange, SQL, Oracle, Linux, Microsoft cluster and VMware ESX implementations. Designing fibre channel fabrics- zoning, ISL, trunking. Log analysis of storage devices, switches and hosts as part of Dell’s SAN Maintenance Service offering.

 

Enterprise Regional Support Engineer duties included: On-call for Dell’s gold and platinum customers in the mid-Atlantic region. Storage and backup troubleshooting, installation, software and firmware upgrades, and analysis in a customer-facing position. Field support and implementation for Clariion, Brocade, McData, tape backup (hardware and software), ISCSI and EMC layered apps. End to end (HBA, switch and storage) SAN throughput and capacity assessment. Exchange, SQL, VMware, Microsoft cluster and Linux deployment and support in a shared storage environment.

 

Baltimore City Municipal Government (WAN Engineer/Senior Network Engineer) 2000–2004

 

Contractor for the newly created Mayors Office of Information Technology which was tasked with consolidating all of the departmental LANs and NT4 domains into a centralized MAN and Active Directory tree.

 

WAN Engineer duties included: On-Call for all intra-city government data traffic except for the Police and Heath Departments. Supporting over 70 remote sites connected via ISDN, T1, Fiber, Frame Relay and Wireless. Connectivity to the Internet, ASPs, Library system, School System, State Govt. Adding 30 remote sites to the city’s network. Supporting Cisco, Nortel and Cabletron routers and switches. Providing support to junior staff.

 

Senior Network Engineer duties included: Server, router and switch deployment. Installing and administering IIS, MSSQL and Exchange. SAN Deployment.

 

Walden International Investment Group/ Walden Venture Capital (Network Engineer) 1998–2000

 

Duties included: Day to day administration of network and datacenter services. Team lead for the migration from a POP3 email system to a multi-site Exchange 5.5 system. Conclave firewall implementation. Connecting eight offices in Asia and three in northern California via T1s and VPNs. Performing Netware to NT migration. Implementing ISDN video conferencing system. Installing and maintaining IIS servers. Connectivity and routing within an eleven site network. Network security, virus defense, email and user administration, backups.

 

PC Technician 1995–1998

 

Duties included: Desktop support for 1000 users in a combined Novell and NT environment

Core competencies

storage design, data replication, disaster recovery, performance analysis, backups, virtualization

 

Certifications

Current: VMware Certified Professional

Expired: EMCPP Expert, Brocade Certified Fabric Professional, CCNA, MCSE, MCP (Exchange and MSSQL)

 

Technical Skills

 

Hardware: VMAX, VNX, Avamar, DataDomain, NetApp, RecoverPoint, VPLEX, Brocade director class and FCIP routers, Cisco routers and switches, Dell, HP and Cisco server hardware.

 

Software: vCloud Director, vCloud Application Director, VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware View, FAST, Unisphere, SAN Copy, MirrorView, Celerra Replicator, SnapView, SPA, NaviAnalyzer, Replication Manager, AppSync, PowerPath, NetBackup,  DCFM, Exchange,  MSSQL, Oracle (OCFS, ASM, FRA, RMAN)

 

OS

ESXi, Windows, Red Hat, Ubuntu

 

Protocols

FCIP, ISCSI, CIFS, NFS, pNFS, FCoE, NDMP, SNMP, DHCP, DNS, RIP, OSPF, HSRP, SNMP

 

Programming Languages

PowerShell, SQL, Shell Scripting, sed, awk

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