UNIX Mid Range Support Consultant

Visionpool Business Services is hiring a UNIX Mid Range Support Consultant who will provides for the day-to-day administration, management, and support of the UNIX environment. THIS OPPORTUNITY IS LOCATED 100% ON SITE IN REGINA, SASKATCHEWAN

RESPONSIBILITIES (included but not limited to):

• Ensure a secure, highly available Data Centre environment to support business requirements.

• Continually monitor all systems, platforms and environments for availability, capacity, and

performance, and proactively manage, including configuration management and asset reporting and refresh, the environments, as appropriate, to minimize the risk of service disruption.

• Provide backup and recovery and disaster recovery services and, where needed, high availability environments. UNIX Server Technician shall effectively manage incidents and problems following escalation and notification procedures.

• Work with appropriate third parties in a coordinated manner to ensure compliance with best practices, policies and procedures and regulatory requirements.

• Monitor on an ongoing basis that there are adequate facilities within the Data Centre(s) configured for the current and planned server and other computing requirements, including:

• Rack space,

• Suitable power,

• UPS support,

• Cabling – e.g., Network, SAN, etc.,

• Port availability on core switches and firewalls,

• Adequate Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Systems,

• Blade slots in chassis, and

• Physical security.

• Data Center Services

• Assist with provisioning of hardened and secure data center environment located at facilities.

• Follow leading practices for facility services such as power redundancy, AC, etc.

• This includes the following services:

• Escorted access for non-authorized staff and representatives will be provided,

• Environmental controls, including temperature and humidity on raised floor space,

• Fire alarms and fire suppressions systems,

• Conditioned UPS based electrical circuits,

• Uninterruptible power supply,

• Physical security for equipment, forms, tapes, and documentation,

• Temporary use of shared office facilities as appropriate,

• Redundant data communication entry points to the facility, and

• Provide Audit reports as required by Auditors or Internal Audit.

• Direct Storage Management (DASD)

• Monitor, manage, optimize, and control direct access storage performance management, initialize direct access storage volumes, establish direct access storage standards, and perform catalogue management.

• Direct Access Storage Management encompasses administration, maintenance, backup,

• recovery, tracking, control, monitoring, and reporting DASD and tape data storage utilization. Storage Management produces useful information for analyzing trends in performance,

• capacity, availability, and load balancing as they are related to data storage. This support includes the following:

• Identifying and maintaining the appropriate threshold levels to reduce potential space constraints,

• Communicating disk space availability, space-related problems, and areas of potential problems,

• Data movement mirroring, remote vaulting,

• Creating and maintaining plans for system and user catalogues and for incremental and full-volume backup and recovery,

• Recommending efficient block sizes, migration criteria, and other parameters that affect DASD usage and capacity,

• Allocating storage pools, as required, and approved by service requests for production and testing,

• Reporting on direct access storage utilization, allocation, and historical usage of datasets on direct access storage.

• Capacity Management

• Project future trends and capacity requirements for new projects and provide such information to the appropriate personnel as it pertains to the services.

• Monitor and document current workload trends and provide the information to T&S Management for use in determining future capacity requirements.

• Performance management

• Define current and future requirements and plans determining capacity and performance requirements.

• Execute approved requests of additional capacity for Intel Windows based Servers.

• Test Server performance, capacity, and throughput for new or changed applications before promoting such applications into the environment or components; and

• Establish a schedule for performance of dedicated server maintenance (for example, virus and malicious software detection, backup, disk space cleanup) and for

• implementing modifications and enhancements to the environment to minimally affect availability of the environment.

• Define thresholds within the selected tool's capability and performance indicators to monitor UNIX server platform performance against such indicators.

• Install and configure system management agents for the operating system using SRM (Server Resource Management) tool or equivalent tool.

• Take appropriate resolution action (for example tuning), when Midrange/UNIX server performance is impacted.

• Monitor, collect, and analyze server performance, utilization data for CPU, memory, LPARs, and disk space.

• Compile configuration data and trends.

• Establish thresholds and exception reporting procedures.

• Develop, review, revise standard reporting templates

• Provide ad-hoc reports, as requested by T&S or one of the business units.

• Availability Management

• Work with business units to define availability requirements.

• Ensure the appropriate personnel are available to interface with server personnel, as required, to isolate or resolve problems.

• Develop an availability plan.

• Track, analyze and report on availability.

• Provide hardware maintenance in accordance with the equipment manufacturer's specifications.

• Recommend availability improvements.

• Processing Operations

• Responsible for selecting or defining requirements for all applications software. The contractor will operate the applications software selected by , provided such applications software conforms to the operating environment standards.

• Provide computer room operations support and perform console monitoring as it relates to alerts generated by the systems management tools.

• With the approval of the Service Owner, schedule systems maintenance to minimize interference with business operations; and

• Monitor ad-hoc job submissions to production and user acceptance testing Midrange/UNIX systems to verify that these jobs are successfully completed.

• Systems and Technical Support

• Follow ITIL disciplines to execute incident and problem management processes.

• Incidents from the Service Desk are processed according to defined SLUs within the trouble ticket system.

• Work with other support teams to provide a resolution to incidents.

• Escalate problems/incidents, where necessary, to the required individual or group both inside and outside of .

• Perform all technical system support operations, including tape management, system programming, capacity planning and performance tuning for the UNIX systems.

• Provide support for all UNIX based systems.

• Evaluate, recommend, install, and maintain all systems software including vendor-supplied patches, service packs, quality packs, hot-fixes, and releases.

• Apply preventive maintenance and program temporary fixes for no additional charge by the applicable vendor to correct defects.

• Provide or obtain new versions and releases, upgrades, replacements, or additional systems software as agreed-to with by the Service Owner.

• Support the operating systems and subsystems, compilers, standard products, and operational tools.

• Maintain and manage stored server images with respect to upgrading and patching all systems software, system management software, tools, or agents.

• Ensure backup up of stored server images is performed.

• Report the performance of the environment and tune it to achieve improved performance levels.

• Manage and maintain server consoles.

• Install, maintain, and manage all required system management software or agents.

• Shutdown or restart the operational environment or its components, as required, in-line with T&S procedures.

• Monitor and administer security for the operational environment in accordance with security policy, including reporting security violations to Security.

• Utilization of account administration, passwords, Kerberos ticket granting, file access

• security, audit trails and logs, encryption services along with Intrusion Detection (maintained by the Network Group).

• Provide the skills, experience and knowledge required to supply tier 2 support – including backups so there is coverage for vacation, illness, etc.

• Rebuild servers including hardware, operating system software and application software and data due to a server failure.

• Graceful shutdown of servers during a power outage.

• Use of asset management tool (SAP) and processes to track (add, move, remove) all Midrange equipment.

• A high-level summary of Midrange server assets and their deployment is provided with every monthly report.

• Virus Management

• Assist Enterprise Architecture in defining policies and procedures for governing Anti-virus such as frequency of updates, Anti-virus software used, and incident management when a breach occurs.

• Supply and make available all virus detection software and services for platforms and networks, and install new updates, as they become available from vendors.

• For those platforms and systems that do not currently provide virus protection capabilities, Server Technicians will make recommendations for upgrades or replacements that will allow increased virus protection capabilities.

• Protect, repair and secure all in-scope operating system software, application software and hardware in the environment from viruses.

• Prevent, detect, destroy, cure or isolate computer viruses.

• Hardware maintenance and Monitoring

• Proactively coordinate and execute maintenance tasks in the environment as a preventative measure to avoid service failure.

• Identify the most stable, current release of software and firmware and implement, following release management documentation.

• Maintain synchronized operating systems and software levels to provide a homogenous, simple, and flexible environment.

• Plan for major operating system updates, patches, and firmware releases on a regular and predictable cycle.

• Support of the following Midrange disciplines, such as, but not limited to:

• VAX DCL

• UNIX – AIX - 90 LPARS (Dynamic LPARS plus physical instances)

• Oracle and Oracle Operational DBA

• Veritas NetBackup (v6.5)

• Linux RedHat – 20 installs

• Nagios

• Manage relationships with hardware vendors.

• Configure and maintain all in-scope peripherals relating to UNIX servers.

• Detailed hardware monitoring on all servers to include alerts for hardware failures to improve response time and reduce downtime.

• Monitor the AIX environment including the Oracle databases, SAP, GIS, and Veritas NetBackup, Real time monitoring is done via daemons and a scheduler.

• The Midrange Team also uses the AIX system scheduler to run automated scripts to capture data on the performance and availability of the system at regular intervals.

• Monitor key backups through customized Veritas NetBackup scripts and receive monitoring from them

• Utilize vendor-provided system tools, third party tools and key system data logged at regular intervals to provide ad-hoc monitoring and reporting.

• *Note - These processes and procedures are used 24/7 to deal with both prime time and after hour midrange problems

• Service Level Management

• Collect details of requirements from the user organization.

• Draw up business requirements to be discussed with Vendor Management.

• Draw up a monthly internal service report based on collected internal reports for applications supported in their respective areas.

• Check the quality of the internal reports.

• Evaluate the realization of Service Level Agreements. Compare the performance indicators and standards, such as those concerning the product delivery time, the handling time for incidents, the invoices / payments.

• Help to draw up Service Level Agreements.

• Supply input for products and services that must be bought/ordered.

• Review and update Operating Level Agreements (OLAs) and Service Level Understandings (SLUs).

• Consolidate monthly SLO Report, based on collected reports.

• Lead consultations with Vendor Management regarding Service Level Management.

• Regular evaluation of the service in consultation with customer and supplier/vendors.

• Organize a regular review; and

• Check the agreements for quality.

• Technical Documentation

• Maintain technical documentation for in scope services including:

• Server configurations,

• IP addresses and domain names of all in scope hardware,

• Documentation of cluster and contingency plans for hardware failure,

• A diagram depicting the in-scope devices attached to the network infrastructure,

• Preventative maintenance and repair logs provided by 3rd party support vendors,

• A list of directories for in scope equipment,

• Server build documents, and

• VLAN resource assignments.

• Standard performance reports daily, weekly, monthly

• Documented and agreed-to listing of thresholds and triggers.

• Ensure that the service goals and objectives are achieved as well as the overall quality of service delivered.

• Interact with team members, client representatives, vendors, and T&S managers and address and resolve issues and concerns at the day-to-day operational level.

• Responsible for the systems architecture, planning and management of operational projects such as upgrades, enhancements etc.

• Primary Transition to Operations Coordinator for all Infrastructure Projects

• Privacy Contact for Operations

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE:

• Computer Engineering / Computer Science Degree

• Minimum 5 years experience in a UNIX Mid Range Support role

• Demonstrated record of continuous improvement

• ITIL Certification (Foundation, Service Manager)