Don Spidell

Work with various clients across multiple industries, with a focus on financial institutions, to modernize their IT infrastructure. Craft custom infrastructure solutions in the public cloud to save money, drive innovation, and create competitive advantage. Mentor Cloud Architect colleagues.

Served as a management-level technologist and strategist responsible for assuring Library & IT provides current, highly-responsive technology infrastructure to the Bucknell University community. Architect, plan, oversee, and maintain the University’s data centers, telecommunications, and wired/wireless networking infrastructure, as well as focus on cloud first when deploying new technologies. Lead and manage System Integration team and Network & Telephony team. Vision, implement, and support an ever-evolving multi-year roadmap of leading local and cloud infrastructure services, including CapEx and OpEx budgets.

• In close collaboration with colleagues across IT, developed University’s first multi-year infrastructure roadmap, receiving strong support from CTO, CIO, President, and Board of Trustees.
• Replaced antiquated tape-based data backup solution with AWS cloud solution using better backup software which saved money, time, and space required for backup storage.
• Implemented VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure to replace legacy hosts for VMware environment which reduced physical server footprint as well as time and effort required to maintain server infrastructure.
• Co-led successful VDI pilot built on VxRail technology and VMware Horizon, which was well-received by faculty, staff, and students, and is being expanded in 2019.
• Led recurring disaster recovery testing to ensure resilient infrastructure and viable business continuity plans in the event of a disaster.
• Conducted briefings for various groups, including CIO’s Council, Student Government, and President.
• Negotiated annual maintenance agreements with various vendors to save money and assure appropriate levels of service and coverage.

Led and managed the administration of corporate technology infrastructure and servicing of external IT Services clients. Spearheaded efforts to preserve uptime of internal and customer-facing web services and digital products. Designed and architected highly-available, distributed, loosely-coupled systems on Amazon Web Services. Developed the external IT services revenue stream and portfolio of service offerings. Performed IT audits for external clients and collaborate with their executives to improve their infrastructures. Evaluated, selected, and managed IT vendors to deliver products and services to the company. Delivered IT reports at monthly all-company meeting. Participated in weekly leadership team meeting and periodic strategic and operational planning meetings to work towards company goals with other department heads and company owners.

• Saved over $100,000 annually and increased system reliability and flexibility by migrating away from traditional co-located servers to a cloud-based infrastructure on AWS.
• Achieved 99.996% system uptime over 8 years (with 4 years hitting 100%) for hosting our core product - digital magazines which receive 2 to 3 million hits per day.
• Shifted Nxtbook IT from a reactive to proactive position by implementing automated monitoring and problem alerting for all systems and servers.
• Facilitated technology portion of office relocation in 2014 with zero downtime for internal information services and telecom.
• Implemented system health dashboard to easily and clearly communicate service notifications and incident status to stakeholders.
• Introduced helpdesk ticketing system to streamline process for customers to submit help requests and track time spent on issue resolution.
• Migrated our corporate email & calendaring from an onsite Zimbra server to Google Apps for Work.
• Renegotiated content delivery network contract saving 50% while maintaining the same level of service.
• Created a method for automatically scaling our pool of web servers to save money and increase performance prior to AWS’ introduction of their autoscaling service.
• Implemented a hybrid cloud storage solution with snapshotting to allow our onsite data storage capacity to easily scale to match our growing demand for reliable storage with simple recovery options.
• Upgraded our corporate phone system and multiple client systems from onsite PBX systems to cloud-based VOIP solutions resulting in reduced usage and maintenance costs.

Provided helpdesk problem diagnosis and resolution for 125 local and remote users across the US. Domain Administrator for fleet of Windows servers. Upgraded hardware and software on workstations and servers. Participated in weekly team meetings to share knowledge and streamline processes.

• Revamped corporate intranet site to make information easier to find for employees.
• Developed websites for multiple corporate holdings.
• Decreased time to resolve helpdesk tickets by 20% over predecessor.