Keith Larkin's Data Center Operations and Project Management Experience
1. KEITH LARKIN
42 West Crown Terrace
Yardley, PA 19067
H: 215-428-6993 keith_larkin@verizon.net C: 215-666-3122
DATA CENTER OPERATIONS / PROJECT MANAGER & NETWORK ENGINEER
Over 12 years experience as a Data Center Operations Manager, Project Manager, and Network Engineer
within the publishing industry. Promoted to manage wiring infrastructure, phone systems, and switch and
router implementations for 260 remote site locations. Completed up to four office relocations each month
in response to changing construction market conditions. After consolidation of individual business units’
technology departments into one Global organization, assumed additional responsibilities for network
infrastructure monitoring, structured cabling, project management and data center operations.
TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE
HARDWARE: Various Cisco Switches Enterprise/Workgroup, HP Blade Servers, Sun Servers, APC
PDU’s, Avaya Systimax structured cable, Panduit structured cable, Corning Fiber, EMC DMX, EMC
VMAX, Brocade Switches, Cisco Routers. HP Blade Server Switches, 3Com hubs and switches, Avaya
IP Office, New Cabinet Installations, Fluke
SOFTWARE: Microsoft Windows: 7, XP, 2000, 95 and NT. Microsoft: Project, Visio, Word, Excel,
Power Point, SQL Microsoft: DNS, DHCP, WINS, Cisco IOS, Layer 2 support, SolarWinds: Network
Performance Monitor, Orion Network Configuration Manager, Orion Application Performance Monitor,
Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Orion IP Address Manager, Engineer’s Toolset, NetScout nGenius K2,
SNMP Configuration, BMC Remedy, TCP/IP, Altiris Asset Management Solution, Nortel Switches
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
THE MCGRAW-HILL COMPANIES, Hightstown, NJ 1998 – 2009
Manager, Data Center Operations
Managed daily operations within the McGraw-Hill/Equinix co-location facilities with an annual budget of
$5M. Managed both McGraw-Hill employee visitors and vendors for project work. Tracked power for
installation and de-installation. Administered facilities access as well as shipping and receiving of all
hardware. Interfaced with the Equinix sales team and Implementation Managers.
• Assumed responsibility for the facilities at a time when available space for growth within the primary
cage could not be used due to lack of power. Completed a full power inventory and subsequently
removed 39 circuits for an annual savings of $240,000 and yielding sufficient available power to
build out 20 new cabinets in a previously closed facility.
• Identified power over-utilization as a risk to production and that unmonitored PDU’s required AMP
clamp readings by cabinet to ascertain those in jeopardy. Retrofitted 50+ cabinets with new APC
PDU’s that allowed remote monitoring via Solarwinds and increased power from 120/20 to 208/30 to
bring the power load under 45% on primary and redundant circuits.
• Decreased overall power draw through power realignment. Replaced horizontal PDU’s with verticals
and increased power, which permitted the addition of new equipment to open cabinet space that was
2. previously unusable and the consolidation of existing servers, allowing the shutdown of entire racks
to make new space available for growth.
• Introduced inventory management where none had previously existed. Inventoried all 180 cabinets
and created a Visio diagram, including tracing out and labeling all connections from origination to
destination. As a result, accurate information was provided to the server engineers, enabling them to
identify where servers were located in the event they needed to be worked on. As a bonus, determined
that approximately 40 servers were no longer needed and de-installed them, resulting in a reduction in
power that saved the company an additional $72,000 annually.
Project Management
Determined requirements, managed the budget and acquired business and technology resources needed to
successfully implement projects on or ahead of schedule, thereby reducing costs and increasing the
business unit’s ability to meet current and future demands. Served dual roles of project manager and
network engineer for the following projects:
McGraw-Hill-Equinix Data Center Operations
• Led a project team to install new power and managed server administration teams to migrate
production to new power and remove abandoned power with either no down time or very short
change windows. Managed vendors to build out new rows.
3. KEITH LARKIN
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THE MCGRAW HILL COMPANIES (continued)
Switch and Router Monitoring
• Reviewed and selected software capable of monitoring all of McGraw-Hill’s switches and routers.
Implemented Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, which allowed for ease of configuration
management. Consolidated network view and inventory management with build in alerting. As a
result, outage notification transitioned from relying on users to contact the helpdesk to engineers
receiving e-mail notification at the time of a switch or router failure.
• Standardized comprehensive inventory management and reporting. Produced daily and weekly
reports and sent them automatically to upper management. Accurately reported network up time.
Made trouble shooting easier with centralized log reporting and improved the quality of information
provided to Cisco TACAC. This resulted in real savings to the corporation, allowing the network
team to be proactive instead of reactive.
• Set-up Solarwinds alerts to automatically open Remedy helpdesk tickets.
55 Water Street Data Center Refresh
• Led a project team to redesign the data center network architecture. Replaced old supervisor modules
with new sup 720’s. Upgraded power supplies and line cards to provide gig service data center wide.
Added two new 6509’s for an access layer to sit between routers and server layers with redundancy.
• The project eliminated latency across the network and reduced the overall time for weekly and
incremental backups. Most important, this brought McGraw-Hill into compliance with Security and
Exchange Commission regulations.
Domestic ISDN to Frame Relay Roll Out
• Identified ISDN dial-up service for replacement with frame relay at 110+ remote business unit
locations. Completing this project resulted in $1.2M in savings and stabilized the wide area network.
The project also standardized business on one of three router offerings for ease of administration.
• Managed the vendor relationship with AT&T for new frame circuits installs and remote vendors for
cable installations and router swap outs.
• Provided leadership and direction to the project team by understanding business processes, gathering
requirements, identifying potential usability issues, managing scope and communicating user
expectation level directly to the customers.
Remote Office Relocation's
• Standardized the office relocation process, enabling a smooth process from start to finish, and
averaging up to four moves per month, which allowed offices to remain competitive and more
accessible to customers.
4. • Developed a “playbook” outlining the relocation process from project inception to completion.
Collaborated with a national vendor to allocate resources so as to complete new location build outs
and demolition of old sites in a timely manner.
GILLESPIE ADVERTIZING, Lawrenceville, NJ 1997 – 1998
Sole Support Person, Network/Phone/Desktop/Application Support
• Supported 120 person office Mac and PC workstations.
• Supported servers housing all the corporations work, the network, and the cable infrastructure.
• Built out new work stations as needed and upgraded applications as patching was required.
• Handled all technology for business pitches for new and existing customers
KEITH LARKIN
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VANSTAR CORPORATION, Elmwood Park, NJ 1996 – 1997
Network and application consulting firm, purchased in 1998 by Inacom
Systems Engineer / Consultant
EDUCATION
BA (Cum Laude), Rider University, Lawrenceville (2008)
Member, Pi Sigma Alpha - National Political Science Honor Society
CERTIFICATIONS
Project Management Certificate Program, The McGraw-Hill Institute,
Mercer County Community College (2007)
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Just Enough Project Management
Tool and Techniques of Project Management
Cisco Advanced Cisco Campus Switching
CCNA Boot Camp; PMP Boot Camp
Nortel Networks 8000 Configuration and Management
AFFILIATIONS
Member - Project Management Institute (PMI)
(Delaware Valley & New Jersey Chapters)
SIG Design / Procurement / Construction
SIG IT & Telecom; SIG Students of PM