Nathaniel Rakel

As a TSE, two years ago I was assigned a single dedicated customer and was originally concerned that the workload would not be quite as high and my complacency levels may rise. I have been on the same account since April 2015 and you better believe I am the furthest thing from complacent. I have dedicated my focus to creating and maintaining a stable Linux and Solaris environment for the customer and the frequency of incidents has reduced by ~60% since I joined the team. This was achieved by minimizing false positive alerts, customizing thresholds to appropriate levels, and performing maintnance within the environment to avoid the bugs that exist in a stale environment. There were several new tasks with this role, most specifically maintaining a custom sendmail environment and custom bind DNS environment, including DNSSEC. These were not new concepts, but it was the first time I was explicitly in charge of general maintenance of this type as well as advising on best practices. The most prestigious honor I have received came from this role. Less than a year into the position, we ran a disaster recovery test. I had not been briefed on the specifics of the test, but we were using VMWare's SRM (Site Recovery Manager). I quickly learned how it worked as the original run resulted in a critical failure on step 1. The team became deflated and felt we were not going to be able to provide a successful DR test, however another TSE and myself took the reigns and manually recovered the entire environment. Due to my efforts, I was awarded Employee of the Month, which spans several teams, three regions and thousands of employees. Since that time, I have worked hand-in-hand with the DR consultants and virtualization team and we have fully automated recovery of the production environment, including applications, DNS, loadbalancing, physical and virtual servers. Specialties: RHEL 5, 6 and 7 Solaris 10 VMWare DNS (Windows DNS, BIND9, DNSSEC) Disaster Recovery Sendmail