About Me
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Mr. Birk has a wide breadth of varied experience related to information technologies. He started out in the field working in a Systems Analyst role where he worked with various hardware and software platforms. He was the technical lead on a company wide deployment of full hard disk encryption for 3,000+ laptops. After an extremely successful deployment, and after gaining enough knowledge, he quickly moved into a Systems Administration role where he worked with several different platforms including Windows Server, VMware, Citrix and Novell. Ryan has always enjoyed working with virtualization products since he deployed his first virtual machine over a decade ago. He decided this was an area where he wanted to focus and grow professionally. Over the years he has been focusing on expanding his knowledge on the different virtualization and cloud platforms and the various technologies surrounding it. He consistently tries to stay abreast of the different vendor offerings. Since 2007, Ryan has also been Associate Faculty in the Computer Technology department for Purdue University.
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RECENT REPONSIBILITIES
- Maintained and grown a global VMware vSphere 4 infrastructure at Eli Lilly and Company. An environment that consisted of over 3,000 virtual servers and 5 vCenter servers.
- Worked with a VMware View environment at a Fortune 500 company which consisted of over 1,000 virtual desktops globally.
- Managed a virtualized Proof-of-Concept VMware vSphere environment.
- Assisted clients with Microsoft Hyper-V implementations and migrations to a highly available architecture.
- Worked with clients to consolidate their Citrix server environments.
- Perform VMware vSphere audits at several clients to ensure best practices are in place.
- Assisted clients with shared storage installations including fiber channel and iSCSI/NFS.
- Implemented and managed several full VMware vSphere installations with clients who had little or no prior virtualization experience.
- Worked with clients to move critical server infrastructure to cloud services to scale with their needs and provide a more reliable infrastructure.
- Implemented RSA multi-factor authentication for a client.
- Designed an internal self-service cloud based service for internal demo and proof-of-concept use.
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COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Professional Development: VMworld 2009, VMworld 2010, VMworld 2011
Virtualization Community Involvement: Helped build a self paced VMware PowerCLI lab from scratch for the Indy VMUG “Demo Days” all day user conference in July 2011. The lab ran throughout the day to anybody who wanted to walk in and learn. The “Demo Days” event had over 900 attendees! After receiving great reviews (4.2/5 rating), leaders at the Cincinnati VMUG asked if the same lab could be ran at their event. The team then updated the content, was informed that the new thin clients would only work with VMware View and therefore decided to build a VMware View front-end within 24 hours and took it on the road to the first Cincinnati all day conference in November 2011 where the lab received great reviews again.
Spent time on weekends doing VMware bootcamps to help local small businesses get started using VMware products.
Professional Affiliations: VMware User Group Member (Co-President from 2008-2009), Indiana Computer Educators, Co-Founder – Indy Cloud Users Group, IndySec Member
Speaking Engagements: Alumni Panel, Office of Career Services and Professional Development, IUPUI – (2008-2011), Speaker, Indy Cloud Users Group – Cloud Technologies Lightning Talk, Spoke several times over the last several years at Indy VMUG meetings.
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RECENT JOB EXPERIENCE
New Horizons United, VMware Certified Instructor (11/2011-Present) – New Horizons United is a VMware Authorized Training Center. The “New Horizons United” group is several New Horizons franchises located on the east coast of the United States (New York, Boston, etc.) as long as the Seattle, WA office. Ryan was brought on as one of the first VCIs inside New Horizons to help grow the New Horizons VATC. He is currently based out of Indianapolis, Indiana and teaches various authorized VMware courses.
Purdue University: Associate Faculty (04/2007 – Present) – Ryan has been Associate Faculty for Purdue University since April of 2007. He was brought on initially to teach a single systems administration class. After the initial semester and hearing the students feedback, he was hired on for additional courses. He has taught Advance Network Administration, Network Operating System Administration, Network Security, Virtualization and Cloud Topics courses.
Apparatus: IT Consultant, Virtualization (03/2008-11/2011) – At Apparatus, Ryan worked in several different roles. He spent time focusing on building and leading a virtualization practice within Apparatus. His depth of knowledge in this area made this a logical choice. Ryan spent time at multiple companies deploying virtualization tools and spent time deploying internal solutions at Apparatus as well. Before leaving Apparatus, Ryan worked with multiple small to medium sized businesses looking to grow their own use of virtualization and shrink their physical footprint. This includes everything from virtual desktops, internal self-service clouds to physical-to-virtual migration projects.
Sallie Mae: Systems Administrator (10/2006 – 02/2008) – As a Systems Administrator at Sallie Mae, Ryan helped implement and maintain a wide variety of physical and virtual servers running Windows, Linux and Novell NetWare platforms located at various building locations across the United States. He maintained their VMware ESX infrastructure with hundreds of virtual machines utilizing HP C-class blade servers and a SAN. He also supported a diverse Citrix environment consisting of over 80 servers running both Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 and 4.5. His daily tasks also included maintaining a 60 server Novell NetWare 6.5 file and print infrastructure at various corporate locations. Ryan helped with an upgrade of their VMware environment to Virtual Infrastructure 3, converting their remaining GSX hosts to ESX and implementing HP Insight Manager 5.1 for systems monitoring and event notification.
Sallie Mae: Systems Analyst (10/2005 – 02/2008) – Ryan had worked on many different projects and deployment teams at Sallie Mae. He was the technical lead for an initiative to deploy AES-256 full hard disk encryption with pre-operating system authentication and a central management interface for password resets and recovery for the disk encryption. The project was implemented on 3,000 laptops and was a great success. It was completed in November of 2006 after six months of planning, testing and deployment phases.
Ryan was also active on a team which streamlined the Sallie Mae workstation setup procedures. After implementation, the need for multiple workstation images was eliminated, saving storage costs, bandwidth and time. While working on these project teams, he conducted research on proposed system upgrades, identified potential incompatibilities with outside products and researched operational benefits while maintaining Sarbanes Oxley and FDIC audit requirements. In addition to administration tasks, he created and maintained system documentation.
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KEY TECHNOLOGIES
Operating Systems: Windows (XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003, Server 2008), Linux (multiple distributions), MacOS.
Applications: VMware vSphere 5, VMware vSphere 4, VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, VMware View, VMware Converter, VMware vCenter, VMware GSX, VMware ESX(i) (2.x / 3.x / 4.x /5.x), VMware Workstation/Fusion, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Amazon Web Services
Programming / Scripting: Windows Powershell, VMware PowerCLI
Certifications: VMware Certified Instructor, VMware VCP 5, VMware VCP 4, VMware VCP 3, Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, Microsoft Certified IT Professional: Windows Server 2008 R2, Virtualization Administrator, CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, CIW Associate
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EDUCATION
Capitol College
Master of Science in Information Assurance
Purdue University
Bachelor of Science in Computer Technology
