For the past nine years I have been one of the senior system administrators at Dreamworks Animation. Initially I was brought on board as their backup architect, as they needed someone to rebuild their backup infrastructure. Back in those days, it was much smaller, it only involved around 30 TB of data an a few DLT tape drives, not the 150 TB and 12 drive tape library mixed media library that we have today.

Once the backup system was under control I became more involved in the day-to-day operations and development projects. This included your typical linux system administrator activities, maintaining the intranet web servers, and tool and web application development. In addition, I designed, built, and maintained the monitoring infrastructure consisting primarily of Nagios and Cacti with an assortment of customizations for the Dreamworks environment. I have also assisted with the support of our Network Appliance filers and our network infrastructure.

These days, when not working on our new monitoring systems we are deploying with GroundWork OpenSource or Splunk, I am a senior member of the team supporting our infratructure services, including sendmail, LDAP, DNS, configuration management, and assorted home-grown tools.