HPE infrastructure & enterprise virtualization · Toronto & remote
Most consultants do one or the other. I specialize in HPE compute and storage — Synergy enclosures, Alletra and 3PAR arrays, ProLiant — and in the VMware estate running on top of it. That means platform decisions get made by someone who has to live with both halves. Nearly a decade running production infrastructure at telecom, healthcare, and colocation scale.
Platforms I work in
Services
Most of my work starts as a fixed-price assessment. You get a written recommendation you can act on with or without me — no retainer required to find out where you stand.
Design, build, and lifecycle for Synergy 12000 enclosures and SY480 compute modules — server profile templates in Virtual Connect, composer reimaging, and iSUT-driven firmware orchestration. The standards work is what keeps an estate consistent after the installers leave, and it is the part most deployments skip.
Array specification, deployment, and migration across Alletra and 3PAR StoreServ, including capacity and tiering design, SAN fabric and LUN provisioning, and planning the move off end-of-support arrays without a maintenance window nobody can afford.
A clear picture of your current vSphere footprint, what renewal is actually going to cost you, and a costed three-year comparison against Hyper-V and other alternatives. Delivered as a document your finance team can read.
Upgrading a live hypervisor estate without downtime is a sequencing problem more than a technical one. I have planned and executed this at 4,000+ VM scale, including cross-vCenter moves and distributed switch rebuilds.
Most organizations have backups. Far fewer have ever completed a full restore. I design backup policy around real recovery objectives and prove it by running the restores — informed by having rebuilt 80+ mission-critical servers from bare metal after a live ransomware incident.
Forest and domain upgrades, FSMO role transfers, and controller decommissioning on production directories, planned so that authentication never stops during the cutover.
Hyperconverged
HCI collapses compute, storage, and the fabric between them into one system that scales by adding nodes. It is a genuinely good answer for some estates and an expensive mistake for others — and the difference usually comes down to workload profile rather than vendor choice.
Node count, failure domains, and capacity headroom modelled against your actual workload profile rather than a vendor sizing sheet. Getting this wrong is expensive in both directions — overprovisioned nodes and clusters that cannot survive a host loss.
Moving off separate compute, SAN, and fabric into a converged platform, sequenced so the legacy estate keeps running throughout. This is the same migration discipline as a hypervisor upgrade: the technical steps are rarely the hard part.
Operating VCF across multiple tenants, including vSAN-backed clusters, lifecycle management, and the isolation boundaries that keep one tenant's problem from becoming everyone's. Built on two years running this as a managed service at Equinix.
Day-to-day operation and vendor coordination on converged stacks including Dell EMC VxBlock, plus HPE Synergy composable infrastructure where compute, storage, and fabric are provisioned from a single management plane.
An honest word on vendor selection. I am not a reseller and I do not carry a vendor quota, so an assessment can legitimately conclude that HCI is the wrong shape for your workload and that refreshing your existing three-tier estate is cheaper. That answer is worth as much as the other one.
How it works
The assessment stands on its own. Plenty of clients take the document and execute internally — that is a legitimate outcome, and it is priced that way.
Two weeks. I inventory the compute, storage, and hypervisor estate, then quantify the cost and risk sitting in it today.
A written target architecture with a costed comparison of options, a migration sequence, and an honest account of what could go wrong.
Phased migration inside agreed maintenance windows, with a documented method of procedure and a rollback position at every stage.
Restores tested, replication confirmed, monitoring in place, and documentation handed to your team so the environment stays supportable.
Background
Nearly ten years operating production infrastructure in environments where downtime is measured in revenue.
Rogers Communications
Built out the HPE Synergy 12000 and SY480 Gen10 platform across multiple data centers — server profiles, firmware lifecycle, OneView and Compute Ops — and led the virtualization modernization program running on it, covering 4,000+ virtual machines and 100+ hosts across ten data centers.
Equinix
Operated roughly 1,500 virtual machines across North American data centers in a multi-tenant 24/7 service carrying a 99.99% uptime commitment, including GPU and AI infrastructure.
Metrolinx (Alstom)
Built and monitored virtual infrastructure for transit systems, with 24/7 on-call coverage for severity incidents and backup validation across the estate.
McKesson
Delivered Citrix and clustered VMware environments in healthcare, working alongside storage and networking teams on SAN-backed virtualization.
Arcus Consulting Group
Active Directory migrations, forest trust design, and Citrix delivery for consulting clients.
Certifications
Contact
An ageing Synergy or 3PAR estate facing end of support. A VMware renewal you cannot absorb. A backup nobody has ever test-restored. A migration no one wants to own. Send me the short version and I will tell you honestly whether it is something I can help with.