Bryan Chain, MBA
Senior IT Engineer with Leadership Experience
1613 Juniper Street, Norristown, PA 19401
I am a well seasoned, highly-skilled, and professional Storage Engineer with Management experience. My career goals include maintaining my technical skills while transitioning into more of a technical manager role and away from a systems engineering role. I feel that my Computer Engineering degree combined with my MBA puts me in a unique position to be highly competent at managing technical teams as well as having an eye on the business side of things.
I have over thirteen years of experience dealing with SAN, Enterprise Storage, Backup, and Disaster Recovery environments in the small-medium business to enterprise size atmosphere. Currently I am focused very heavily on NetApp / IBM based storage and Brocade based SAN technologies however I deal with many other platforms, hardware and software, on a daily basis. This includes IBM, Dell, EMC and 3Par based storage, IBM Tape Technologies; Cisco UCS, IBM and HP Blade Chassis from a hardware perspective.
Throughout my career I have worked in very high stress, critical, environments and been subject to SAS 70 and SSAE 16 Audits, NERC-CIP Security/Compliance objectives, and ISO-9001 documentation standards. As such, I have a very heightened sense of reliability, availability, security, and compliance in every aspect of my work. I have worked in both internal IT departments as well as service provider/customer focused environments throughout my career.
Education
Pennsylvania State University
May, 2012
Master of Business Administration
- Professional on-campus cohort, completed while working full-time
Drexel University
May, 2005
Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering
- Included three six-month co-op professional working periods
- Minor in Philosophy
Skills Overview
- Well written and educated engineer with a strong leadership background
- Enterprise storage architecture and administration background across many different vendors/platforms with expert level experience on most NetApp and IBM storage platforms
- Software defined storage experience with commodity hardware running Linux and GlusterFS
- Storage Area Network (SAN) design and implementation experience specializing in Fibre Channel and including IP based storage protocols such as NFS, CIFS and iSCSI
- Backup systems design and administration including TSM, CommVault, Veeam, and Asigra
- Business continuity and disaster recovery expertise
- Over 15 years of professional systems administration proficient in administration of Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Arch, Debian), Windows, AIX
- Well rounded experience with numerous database platforms, programming/scripting languages, enterprise tools and monitoring platforms
- Experienced in highly regulated environments with strict security, compliance, and audit requirements
Professional Experience
Cerner Corporation
April 2016 - Present
Senior Storage Architect
In this role I design and architect enterprise storage solutions for Cerner's EMR systems. This includes new product evaluation, staying on top of the latest technologies, and designing next generation storage solutions.
TierPoint, LLC.
May 2014 - April 2016
Manager, IT Services - Storage & Backup
In this role I am responsible for managing the Storage & Backup team for the north-east region of the TierPoint footprint as well as the support, architecture and implementation of storage & backup solutions as they relate to customer service delivery. This is an extremely high-stress and fast-paced customer facing role. In my day to day I am still highly technical while also responsible for the managerial aspects of my role including budgeting, employee performance management and conflict resolution.
I have an active role in the design and engineering of new product offerings as well as the support of existing infrastructure. I must ensure the reliability, stability, and performance of the back-end storage and backup infrastructure which supports our managed services client footprint. This includes product lifecycle planning, monitoring, automation, and essentially all other aspects of a storage engineering role.
PJM Interconnection, LLC.
Sept. 2006 - May 2014
Senior Enterprise Storage Engineer
My primary role was in the architecture, implementation and administration of PJM’s enterprise storage infrastructure. I was the primary/lead storage architect and lead a team of engineers who were stakeholders in the storage infrastructure in the planning of the architecture over time.
The environment included a large fibre-channel backbone using Brocade DCX director class switches which spanned multiple datacenters. Storage was tiered into several service levels from the highest possible performance/availability down to dev/test environments. Storage platforms in use were diverse from IBM DS8800 down to small entry-level NetApp arrays.
Within the scope of this role I was also responsible for making sure the environment was secure and compliance with NERC-CIP standards. Early in my role I was also responsible for the BCP/disaster recovery management via IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and a robust backup/archive system.
SunGard Availability Services
May 2003 - Sept. 2006
Mid-Range Storage Administrator II
This position began immediately after completing my undergraduate degree as I had completed two of my co-op cycles at SunGard and transitioned directly into employment out of college. I started out as an entry level TSM administrator and expanded my role to include many storage technologies. My primary day to day was in the management and maintenance of the customer facing managed backup services which included design and implementation of new accounts as well as problem solving and resolution of customer issues.
WellPlayed Productions
Mar. 2011 - May 2012
Senior Software Developer / Systems Administrator
I participated in working at this eSports startup at night and in my free time while also working at PJM. In this role I was a member of a very small team who was building a platform for the production and promotion of competitive gaming events. I was in charge of our cloud-based web server stack and also highly involved in the software development of the site itself. The web stack utilized varnish/nginx in front of a traditional LAMP stack. It was automatically scalable for bursts in traffic using RackSpace API’s, leveraged a centralized CDN for serving static content and had a highly available clustered database backend. The entire design was based around having very little finances for infrastructure so it had to perform extremely well on a very tiny budget.
On the software development side the initial code was written in PHP with the CodeIgniter MVC framework but was later re-written in Ruby. I also wrote a lot of frontend UI components using JS/HTML/CS. All development was done as a member of a development team using SVN and later Git for version control.