Bill - Senior Networking Consultant & Taos Practice Leader

Bill is a CISSP certified, senior networking consultant who joined Taos in October 2006 and has over 15 years of technology experience with 9 in networking and network security. Bill's core strengths include IPsec VPNs, OSPF and Cisco ASA Firewalls. He is also a Taos Practice Leader who provides guidance and support to the networking consultant community.

Bill's client engagements have included ONStor, Logitech, VMware, Yahoo and VeriSign.

While at Logitech, Bill's assignment involved lots of international and nationwide travel. He traveled to 11 locations to upgrade the existing Cisco PIX worldwide firewall infrastructure to Cisco ASAs. At Verisign, he is involved in an ongoing project to upgrade some of their existing production network with state of the art network equipment,

Before joining Taos, Bill was a consultant at Cisco and also worked at Boeing Advanced Information Systems as a Senior Network Engineer, ACS as a Network Security Engineer, Lockheed Martin Mission Systems as a LAN/WAN Developer and Cellular One/AT&T Wireless. At ACS, Bill helped manage and upgrade Nike's worldwide network security infrastructure. He was involved in upgrading the Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) at Lockheed and also worked on migrating the existing LabNet ATM network to MPLS at Boeing.

John - Senior Networking and Security Consultant & Taos Practice Leader

John is a senior Networking and Security consultant who joined Taos in 2008. Just a few months later, John's involvement with conducting Technical Interviews, helping to create a security skills matrix and providing escalation support earned him a promotion to Taos Practice Leader.

John's Taos engagements include working with Coherent, Redback and Logitech. He has provided strategic recommendations to increase the efficiency of data center operations and has experience implementing effective network and security solutions. In addition to John's hands-on experience he has the ability to manage projects from implementation through to completion.

Before joining Taos, John worked at Unicom Technology as a Manager of Professional Services, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati as a Senior Network Security Engineer and MetricStream as a Network Operation Manager to name a few. He managed data center operations and network services, conducted risk assessments and audited infrastructure.

Although John's CCIE, CISSP and CISA alone are impressive, the real world experience that he possesses to support his theoretical knowledge make him an invaluable asset for any environment. His professional and natural leadership skills are key contributors to his proven success.

John - Senior Networking Consultant

John is a senior networking consultant who joined Taos in October 2009 and has over 25 years of technology experience. John’s technical areas of expertise are in frame relay, DSL and wireless.

John has been engaged at Danger Networks during his Taos tenure. While on engagement, he has revamped the management network and completed Danger’s inventory.

Prior to Taos, John worked at TimeNet as a field engineer, at MCI in technical support and at Covad in technical marketing. He started many of the groups at Covad such as the Sales Engineering Team.

Jong - Senior UNIX, Networking & Windows Consultant & Taos Practice Leader

Jong is a senior UNIX, Networking and Windows consultant who has been with Taos for nearly 10 years. A highly skilled and knowledgeable consultant, Jong was a natural candidate for the Taos Practice Leader position early on. He routinely conducts Technical Interviews, leads training classes (most recently he has led a Linux workshop series), offers his insight at Practice Leader Office Hours and mentors other Taosers to help improve their skill sets. Jong has implemented and managed a variety of technologies in enterprise environments ranging from complex datacenter deployments for a 24 x 7 environment to highly available online web services.

A few of his Taos engagements include working with Ericsson, Xilinx, Electronic Arts and Danger. At Ericsson, he was the Network Team Lead for integrating Redback's global LAN/WAN into Ericsson's corporate networks and was the senior UNIX SA supporting the IT infrastructure and engineering community. Jong analyzed Electronic Art's world-wide network infrastructure and delivered detailed diagrams to tie the networks together. He also provided best practices for network operations and management.

Prior to joining Taos, Jong was an Engineering Manager at Yahoo where he managed Yahoo's Small Business Web Hosting Operations and was responsible for the uptime and performance of over a million customer domains and web sites. He was also an IT Manager at BDNA where he owned all aspects of IT, managed a team of system administrators and established, planned, initiated, and implemented IT strategies and goals.

Josh - Windows Desktop Consultant

Josh is a Windows Desktop consultant who joined Taos in 2007 and has key strengths in infrastructure services, AD, server management and local systems administration.

While at Taos, Josh has engaged with Brocade and Xenoport. At Brocade he was a part of the Help Desk team providing front line support, setting procedures, creating mail aliases, addressing local system and printer issues and providing virus clean-up. At Xenoport, Josh provided the same level of support as he did at Brocade with the addition of increased server administration.

Shawn - Windows Desktop and Networking Consultant

Shawn is a Windows Desktop and Networking consultant who joined Taos in 2006 and has 10 years of technology experience. Shawn possesses a deep knowledge base in desktop support, Novell NetWare and general networking and Windows systems administration.

His tenure at Taos has included engagements with Citrix, Data Domain, Hansen Medical and Ericsson. Shawn utilized his robust skill set to contribute to a number of projects, including a company-wide system refresh, a corporate building relocation and a data center move.

Prior to Taos, Shawn worked at KLA-Tencor, Applied Materials and ADP. In these roles, he provided level 1 and 2 desktop support, including software upgrades, break/fix and system refreshes.

Jason - Senior Windows Consultant & Taos Practice Leader

Jason is a senior Windows consultant with a secondary Networking skill set. He has been with Taos for a total of nearly 5 years and is also a Taos Practice Leader for the Windows community. Jason contributes his knowledge through leading Practice Leader Office Hours, mentoring other Taosers and conducting Technical Interviews. His key technical strengths lie in storage and virtualization.

Before his EntriSphere engagement, where he has been for nearly 2 years, Jason's other Taos assignments included working at Brocade and Sun. At EntriSphere (acquired by Ericsson), Jason has been working on a Solaris project, a NetApp upgrade, layer 1 switching and implementing virtualization. Jason enjoys contributing high impact solutions and is excited that the Solaris Containers project and other virtualization initiatives will change the way engineering does their work.

Before Taos, Jason worked as an IT Systems Administrator where he managed and maintained IT for a parent company and eight satellite companies. He was responsible for workstations, servers, networks, firewalls, phones, security systems and building access. As a Sr. Network Administrator at Lightspan Partnership, Jason maintained and was responsible for: backup disaster and recover, anti-virus, email system, internal servers, external servers, software rollouts and deployments, corporate LAN, enterprise WAN spanning four different sites using Checkpoint FW1 with Cisco routers and software version control (CVS).

Jim - Senior Windows and UNIX Consultant

Jim is a senior Windows and UNIX consultant who first joined Taos in 2005 and then returned again in 2007. With over 25 years of experience in the technology arena, Jim's strengths lie in Linux, data center management, AD, Exchange and maintaining flexibility and adaptability to any environment.

While at Taos, he has engaged with Mercury Interactive, Katana, PSI, NetApp and Sonic Solutions. In the first 2 weeks at PSI, Jim recognized a critical weakness with the backups and identified a solution. He also organized the PSI data center and increased its manageability. Jim was a technical manager at NetApp and was responsible for managing technical resources to complete high priority IT projects. At Sonic Solutions, he helped them integrate an acquisition and move their servers from one data center to another.

Jim's experience prior to joining Taos includes working for the State of Hawaii Senate as an IT Manager, Digital Equipment Corporation as a Systems Engineer, Global Knowledge, where he taught UNIX, VMS and Networking, and Hands-on Technology Transfer, where he taught AD and Linux System Administration. A few of his accomplishments include writing the student information system for UC Irvine which is still in use today and completing the State of Hawaii Senate's office and data center relocation with less than 8 hours of downtime.

Richard - Senior Windows Consultant

Richard is a senior Windows consultant with additional UNIX and networking skill sets. He joined Taos in 2006 and has over 15 years of technology experience. Richard's technical strengths are in AD, Exchange and Cisco routers.

Richard's Taos engagements have included working with clients such as Agile, NetApp, Dolby

and Innopath. Richard helped Agile close and migrate their data center to the Oracle campus, and he helped Innopath build a secure network. He performed deployments to 8K users at NetApp and helped Dolby establish and build a HP SIM (System Integration Manager).

Before joining Taos, Richard worked at Fujitsu and First American Title utilizing his UNIX and Windows skill sets. In these roles, he upgraded Novell servers and covered all servers for one county.

Jack - Senior Windows Consultant & Taos Practice Leader

Jack Chen is a senior Windows consultant who joined Taos in 2005 and has never looked back. With an impressively deep repository of theoretical and practical experience in Windows Active Directory, Exchange, Security and Hyper-V, Jack continuously impresses clients and fellow Taosers alike.

During his tenure at Taos, Jack has engaged with such clients as Hitachi, Arcsight, Xenoport, VMware, Logitech and Blue Coat Systems. While on assignment, he has led and completed the design, implementation and migration of Windows 2008, Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007.

He has also documented several crucial pieces of technology to assist clients in determining the best tool or product for their environment, which includes Microsoft ILM Life Cycle Manager FP1, and has written a document comparing the features of a third-party DNS and Microsoft DNS. In January 2008, Jack became a Taos Practice Leader, giving him the opportunity to serve as a guiding voice and knowledgeable resource to the Windows consulting community.

Jack began his career as an independent IT consultant before transitioning to key roles in companies such as Hotvoice, Malab, Siebel and Wily. As a network system manager at Hotvoice, Jack designed and implemented an AD forest and web cluster farm. At Malab, Jack acted as the network system lead and redesigned and implemented Windows 2003 forest and Exchange 2000 cluster. He also implemented and managed the corporate WAN. His accomplishments at Siebel as a senior windows architect included leading and completing the AD multiple domains audit and optimization world-wide. At Wily Technology, Jack acted as principal information engineer extensively involved in the planning and deployment of Microsoft Windows 2003 AD forest and Exchange 2003 cluster system and virtualization solution.

Jack is a highly-sought after consultant with an unparalleled level of dedication. His commitment to client success drives him to find the most efficient and cost effective IT solutions. Jack utilizes his natural leadership ability to help his colleagues, whether it is through providing team guidance or through mentoring junior Windows Administrators. Jack is a professional and personable senior Windows consultant who has a long history of delivering successful results on all engagements and in any environment.

Simon - Senior Windows Consultant

Simon is a senior Windows consultant who joined Taos in November 2009. He has 15 years of technology experience with specific areas of expertise in Active Directory, virtualization and SharePoint.

At Taos, he has been engaged with Silver Spring Networks and Yahoo! Simon scaled Exchange for up to 10,000 users at Silver Spring and enjoyed his engagement there because it was an exciting company with massive growth potential. He enjoys his Yahoo! engagement because it’s a fun environment filled with interesting people and challenging issues.

Prior to Taos, Simon worked at MicroMenders as a lead consultant on approximately 30-50 projects per year. He also worked at Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, as an IT liaison for a European investment banking company. Simon has 9 years of IT consulting experience working with small, mid-sized and enterprise clients in red brick industries such as banking, accounting, law and architecture.

Tizoc - Senior Windows Consultant & Practice Leader

Tizoc is a senior Windows consultant who first joined Taos in 1997 and returned again in 2006 and 2008. He has nearly 15 years of technology experience and is extremely knowledgeable in the areas of VMware, AD and Exchange.

A few of his favorite Taos engagements have been with Google, where he worked with Exchange, and Vegas.com, where he built out a virtualized environment on VMware with AD and Exchange 2007.

Tizoc's diverse professional background includes his time as a Windows System Administrator at IAC in New York and at the U.S. Antarctic Program in Antarctica. In addition to Windows, Tizoc also provided some Linux administration in Antarctica. He regularly contributes his expertise to the Taos community by writing technical articles for the Taos Trusted Advisor newsletter, conducting Technical Interviews and leading training classes.

Allen - Senior UNIX and Networking Consultant

Allen is a senior UNIX and networking consultant who joined Taos in April 2008 and has over 20 years of technology experience. Allen has extensive experience in Unix/Linux infrastructure, Cisco routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, OSPF, BGP and monitoring systems.

During his tenure at Taos, one of Allen's favorite engagements has been with Danger where he worked on the UNIX and networking teams and bridged the two teams together. While on assignment on the systems side, he has rolled out pre-production networks and a new data center. On the networking side, Allen has led several projects to increase the stability and manageability of the production network. He continues to provide clients with additional value by conducting project planning to ensure smooth project flow and completion.

Before joining Taos, Allen worked at Offermatica (acquired by Omniture) as a Sr. Systems and Network Engineer where he built out a system and network infrastructure handling hundreds of millions of hits per day. He also enjoyed his tenure at Stardust Technologies where he worked with advanced network technologies, including interoperability testing and the design and building of demonstration/interoperability networks for IP multicast and IP QoS. With several other technical startups under his belt, Allen enjoys building out new infrastructure and helping to modernize and maintain what already exists.

George - Senior UNIX and Networking Consultant & Taos Practice Leader

George is a senior UNIX and Networking consultant who has been with Taos for over 10 years. As a Taos Practice Leader, George is active in the UNIX community, often leading Practice Leader Office Hours and conducting Technical Interviews. He has extensive hands-on experience with UNIX systems, including Sun sales and field engineer training, and experience with Linux in large enterprises. George has a particular focus on systems reliability and high availability engineering and analysis.

While at Taos, he has been engaged with Danger, Safeway, Redback, Raza Micro and NVIDIA to name a few. A few accomplishment highlights include assisting in the design, maintenance and expansion of the corporate network infrastructure, repairing a broken Legato Networker backups environment and designing and implementing new backup schedules.

Gerry - Senior UNIX Consultant

Gerry is a senior UNIX consultant who joined Taos in 2005 and has 25 years of technology experience. In addition to UNIX systems administration, Gerry also possesses complementary skill sets in Windows systems administration and storage administration.

During his tenure at Taos, Gerry has engaged with Hitachi Data Systems where he built an engineering test lab from scratch. He also combined the engineering test lab with four other engineering labs to create a 500+ server lab environment with several petabytes of storage.

Before joining Taos, Gerry worked at Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corp. and Stanford University as a UNIX systems administrator and at Affymetrix as a UNIX Data Center Manager. Over the course of three years at Affymetrix, a leading biotechnology company, Gerry completely re-architected the UNIX computing environment. This upgraded the company from an initial hand full of workstations to a Sun E10000 with additional enterprise server class machines. At Stanford, he re-organized an Artificial Intelligence research lab that had been constructed by professors and graduate students so that industry standard architecture and practices were in place. This covered file serving, backups and application organization.