mparson@bl.org


Michael Parson Austin, TX 512-522-7682

SUMMARY

Experienced computer professional with a strong background in UNIX systems administration, Software Lifecycle, dev-ops, and build and deployment automation with expertise in many popular flavors of UNIX operating systems.

I can only accept positions in Austin, Texas or surrounding areas.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Cisco Corporation, Austin, TX
DevOps Operations Manager, Threat Grid R&D

2019 - present

• Manage an international team of the operations side of the DevOps group supporting Cisco Threat Grid.

DevOps Engineer, Threat Grid R&D

2014 - 2019

• Write saltstack state and pillar configuration management files to bring formerly individually maintained systems under a consistent structure.
• Participate in release engineering calls to approve/deny releases. Operations team rotates team members who actually perform the final build and release to production.
• Approve git merge requests for operations team commits.
• Participate in daily operations team "stand-up calls" to quickly cover what we’ve done, what we’re doing, what we’re blocking on.
• Participate in planning of build-outs of future datacenters for added capacity, geographic diversity to ensure redundancy and business continuity.

IBM Corporation, Austin, TX
RCS World Wide vApp Lab Architect

2013-2014

• Oversaw management of world-wide Rational Client Support (RCS) virtualization lab operations with labs in Littleton, MA (US), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Bangalore (India), and Cumberland, NSW (Australia).
• Modernized the lab infrastructure which was a mix of home-grown scripts and commercial solutions to provide a self-service virtualization lab.
• Wrote automation processes for the deployment of virtual and physical assets used by RCS Technical Support Engineers (TSE) to reproduce customer reported issues and if needed, hand off to development for further debugging.

Team Lead, SWAT, Rational Build Forge

2006-2012

• Team lead for the Rational Build Forge Software Advisory Team (SWAT).
• Managed tickets escalated from the Level 2 support team, interact with Level 2 support team to determine nature of customer reported problem and determine if the problem was with configuration or was a bug in the product. If it was a bug, find the problematic code and patch it or escalate to Level 3 (development support) for code fix.
• Worked with build team to automate the building of Build Forge installation sets and all of it’s pre-requisite parts using Build Forge (self-hosting) and ensuring cross-platform compatibility with archive formats for the installer.
• Was responsible for management of R&D lab used for reproduction of customer environments to assist in replication and debugging of customer issues utilizing multiple operating systems and database technologies in a mix of private cloud and bare-metal systems.
• Assisted members of the sales organization with the implementation and running of Build Forge Proof of Concept (PoC) and Proof of Technology (PoT) demonstrations at customer sites.
• Wrote IBM Technotes on usage of Build Forge and peer-review Technotes written by other members of the team.
• Helped come up with best practices documents related to running and scaling of Build Forge.

Vignette Corporation, Austin, TX

2004 - 2006
UNIX Systems Administrator

• Installed and configured UNIX Servers for use in Proof of Concept systems for demonstrations for potential customers.
• Migrated enterprise backups from legacy Legato Networker systems to Commvault QiNetix.
• Set up Solaris Jumpstart server for automated OS installs.
• Managed disk space on clustered NetApps 960 and R200 filers.

Club Photo, Austin, TX

2003 - 2004
Sr. Systems Administrator

Manage all UNIX based systems for company.

• Managed move of production systems from collocation center in San Jose, CA to Austin, TX. This included bringing up a duplicate set of systems in Austin, replicating web servers, databases, and fileservers.
• Migrated Internet mail server from Sendmail to Postfix.
• Setup company-wide Spamassassin SPAM filtering on corporate mail server.
• Consolidated networks, accounts, and systems resulting from the merger of Club Photo and Skrudland Photo.
• Set up system using ssh and perl tools which allows admin functions to be performed on multiple servers from a central point.
• Optimized image caching and expiration system to maximize disk utilization on web servers.
• Installed centrally managed desktop antivirus system for corporate network.

Skyhorn.com, Austin, TX

2001 - 2003
Sr. Systems Administrator

TManage, Inc., Austin, TX

2001
Sr. Systems Architect

NowDocs, Corp., Austin, TX

1999 - 2001
Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator

IXC Communications Services, Inc., Austin, TX

1997 - 1999
Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator, IXC

Illuminati Online, Austin, TX

1995 - 1997
Systems Administrator

University of Texas at Brownsville

1993 - 1995
Technical Services Manager, Academic Computing

Texas Army National Guard

1991 - 1996
88M-10 Motor Vehicle Operator

OPERATING SYSTEMS EXPERIENCE

Solaris 2.x-10, SunOS 4.x, RedHat Linux (2.0->RHEL 6), HP-UX 11.x, AIX 4+, MacOS X (10.4+), NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSD/OS, Microsoft Windows Desktop/Workstation OSes (3.1 - 8.x) and some work with the server versions (NT 4 - Windows Server 2012)

VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES

• VMWare Desktop, Server, and ESX(i)
• Citrix Xen Server
• Parallels
• Oracle VirtualBox
• Solaris Zones ____________________

The most recent copy of this document can be found at
http://www.bl.org/~mparson/resume/