Ralph Pickering
Infrastructure Consultant
- London,
- England,
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Member Since: 2015/12/05
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Professional Background
Infrastructure Consultant
IT Consultancy specialising in Financial and Legal firms
September 2014 – Present
London
As a consultant in the infrastructure team, I help design and deploy solutions that maximise and protect their information capital. Typical solutions utilise both on-premises and cloud technology to obtain the maximum availability for our client's data, and the design and regular testing of DR procedures ensures that we maintain that availability even when the unexpected happens.
Senior Network Engineer
Events Agency
February 2000 – July 2014
London, Uk
Senior IT administrator / manager promoting, implementing and maintaining best-of-breed technology solutions for a leading B2B agency. Was strategic in developing policies pertaining to information security, life-cycle and business continuity to satisfy the requirements of the business' FTSE100 clients. Successfully steered the IT infrastructure through several platform upgrades, two office relocations, two changes of company ownership and and the acquisition and integration of another agency. IT rationalisation and modernization efforts saw the migration of an ad-hoc, time-intensive physical server infrastructure to an entirely virtualised system with a 10 to 1 server consolidation ratio - leading to cost savings of over 60%. Subsequent platform upgrades took the back-end infrastructure from the original ESX 1.5 through ESX 3, vSphere 4 and 5 and most recently Hyper-V 2012, while the front office moved from Windows NT on a motley collection of desktop computers to a standardised environment with Windows XP deployed using Symantec Ghost initially, and latterly Windows 8.1 Enterprise deployed using WDS. Scripting (vbscript, Powershell and KIXscript) and Group policies are employed to keep configurations consistent and management as hands-off as possible. Have also been responsible for telephony, managing an Avaya system, which was then replaced by a Mitel 3300 platform, and then most recently a move to a cloud-hosted system through Vodafone One Net.
Education
Open University
BA Hons.
Mathematics
2007 – 2014
Full Biography
I am a dyed-in-the-wool geek that mainlines caffeine and technology; quiet - who is never happier than when playing around with a new firewall, or an old Commodore 64; creating a load balanced Raspberry Pi cluster, or studying: whether it be researching new trends in Virtualisation, Maths, Philosophy, Politics, Biology - it doesn't matter really, as long as I'm learning something new.
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Level Progress
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Overall4
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Exchange3
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Networking2
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Hardware Firewalls2
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Cisco1
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Switches / Hubs1
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Networking Hardware-Other1
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Routers1
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Windows Server 20081
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Outlook1
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Active Directory1
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Email Protocols1
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Windows Networking1
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Windows 71
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Network Architecture1
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Windows Server 20121
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SSL / HTTPS1
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Internet / Email Software1
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Wireless Networking1
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DNS1
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Email Servers1
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Email Clients1
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Exclaimer1
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Internet Protocols1
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Microsoft IIS Web Server1
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Software Firewalls1
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TCP/IP1
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VBA1
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Windows OS1