Two Tier III data centers. Five years, no downtime.
At the fund I designed, architected, and helped build two private Tier III facilities.
Thirty high-capacity racks each, one in our building and a second next door a few years
later. In five years of running them we never dropped the load. That includes the day a
power distribution unit arced and started a small electrical fire. Everything stayed up.
The base work is a building problem and a compute problem at the same
time. Power, cooling, and staying up when something fails. I've done it for real, not on paper.
I wrote the automation that ran the whole data center.
I built a platform that tied together the monitoring system, the network and firewalls,
the SAN storage and switches, and the headless server management interfaces. It provisioned
and moved workloads on the fly, stood up test environments on demand, and ran a lot of the
day-to-day operations from one place. This was infrastructure-as-code, DevOps, and data
center management years before any of those were words people used.
That was rules-based automation. The version of it now is agentic:
systems that provision, monitor, and respond on their own. Same instinct, far more capable
tools.
My old storage certifications were on Hitachi's platform.
Earlier in my career I held HP Master ASE certifications in enterprise storage and
recovery, XP storage, clusters and HPC, and servers. They're long lapsed, so I'm not going
to pretend they're current. The part that still matters is that HP's XP array line was
Hitachi's hardware. I've spent real time on that platform.
I'm not claiming to be current on it. But when RISE and Hitachi are in a
room talking storage and HPC, I follow the whole conversation without anyone translating it for me.
I haven't run drones. I've built the pipeline they'd feed into.
After big storms we used a satellite service to survey properties for damage, and I
pulled that data into our analytics. A drone is another sensor feeding a comparable
pipeline. The work that's actually hard is the ingestion and the analysis on the other end,
and that part I've done.
The pile of sensor data isn't useful until something reads it. That's an
AI job now: pulling many feeds into one picture and surfacing what matters. Satellite now,
drones and other feeds later, a similar problem either way.
I've sat in the security chair myself.
Alongside the CTO role I served as acting CISO, owning the security and compliance
function directly. I haven't taken a system through federal accreditation. But from what I
understand of it, it's largely a security-engineering job: defining the boundary,
implementing the controls, monitoring them, and producing the evidence. That work I know.
The security seat is the one most technologists have never held. I have.