Senior Specialist; IT Infrastructure

Reporting line- Manager; Server & Storage

Location- Head Office

Job Summary

To ensure smooth day-to-day operations of all servers, storage and systems by being a subject matter expert in the Server and Storage area and driving the evolution of technologies including but not limited to server hardware, virtualization, containerization, data protection, and operating systems. Responsible for ensuring availability, security, high scalability and high-performance operation in a cost-effective manner.

Key responsibilities:

• Perform daily operation support for Server, Storage, virtualization, operating systems and other related systems.  
• Manages the entire life cycle of servers, storage, virtualization, and operating system, including new acquisition, upgrade patching and decommission.
• Implement effective strategies to improve availability, performance, scalability and security of Server infrastructure, Storage, virtualization, operating systems, and other related systems in a cost-effective manner.
• Analyse metrics to identify harmful trends, capacity forecasting and planning inputs.
• Create and maintain backup infrastructure for both bare-metal and virtual machines with the appropriate SAN, network, or local storage configurations, using both Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and third-party tools on Linux and Windows environments.
• Make sure automated backup is performed as required including tape management.
• Evaluate, improve, and maintain data protection throughout the servers’ infrastructure space.
• Proactively ensure the highest levels of systems and infrastructure availability including verification of the replication of data, fail-over copies and redundant data sets.
• Monitor and test application performance for potential bottlenecks, identify possible solutions and work with developers or system owners to implement those fixes.
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• Develop and maintain custom scripts to increase system efficiency and reduce human intervention time on tasks, such as monitoring with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
• Ensure technical documentation exists i.e. policies, processes and procedures for all virtualization, backup and storage infrastructure.
• Ensure all replication infrastructure between production and disaster recovery is in good working conditions.
• Perform server provision based on security baseline and system requirements.
• Provide daily health checks for server and storage infrastructure.
• Monitor utilization trends of various resources in server and storage area proactively initiate resource increase if required to address capacity or performance issues.

Experience, Knowledge and Skills Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security or related academic field.
• Minimum of  4 years of Server & Storage Systems support experience in banking.
• IT professional certifications in ITIL is required.
• VMware Certified Professional Datacentre Virtualization (VCP-6-DCV).
• Specialist Implementation Engineer Dell EMC Unity Solutions (DCS-IE).
• Certification in Oracle Exadata System.
• Certification in IBM Power Systems.
• Knowledge of Enterprise Server Technologies and Storage Arrays.
• Architectural knowledge of Fabric Networks.
• Hands-on knowledge of zoning, and troubleshooting SAN fabrics.
• Good understanding of NFS and Fiber Channel protocols, Fiber Channel cabling, and zoning.
• Good understanding and working knowledge of IBM AIX, LINUX, Windows Servers, and VMWare ESXi platforms.
• Good understanding of various backup solutions.