Managing a Data Center is a complex task.

Try managing four of them at once. Managing a Data Center is more than keeping the lights on. There are facility aspects, environmental conditions, efficient layout, connectivity and performance tuning to be done. Then there is monitoring to set up. And that’s when everything is running smoothly.

In a crisis or downtime event, there are comms to manage, vendors to bring in, and so much more.

I’ve had the good fortune to manage not one, but four separate physical data centers. And manage major projects to migrate the contents of those four to consolidate into one.

Most recently and on the horizon still: migrating all that processing, workflows, and data to the commercial cloud.

My work at NCEI has included:

  • Design, Distribution, and Deployment of IT assets in the four (now two) NCEI data centers

  • Design and Implementation, and Subsequent Management of, a High-Performance Storage System, which houses over 80 terabytes of climate data

  • Establishment of monitoring of all environmentals - electrical, hvac, airflow, temperatures, and humidity

  • Monitoring and managing the health and performance of all IT assets, including life-cycle/refresh/procurements

  • Establishing continuity of operations plans and offsite scenarios, including annual rehearsal of those plans

  • Vigilant monitoring for cybersecurity threats

  • Managing projects to digitize an enormous paper-record, physical archive

  • Advancing data archive and data access with newer tools, like NiFi and Lambda, and sharing NOAA data with the commercial cloud

I've worked to organize and manage NCEI Data Centers. This includes careful planning and arrangement of assets to make things as efficient as possible. Everything has been laid out with redundancy and 100% uptime in mind. The environment is optimize
Monitoring of the IT Enterprise is as important as any other part of managing the data center. Systems are watched for efficiency and automation is built in to bring additional resources to bare or migrate in trouble systems to healthier clusters as
NCEI has a digital archive with over 80 petabytes of data. I was on the team that partnered with IBM to introduce their High Performance Storage Solution (HPSS) at the turn of the century. That solution was still a part of my job until spring of 2025
All environmental conditions of the data centers were part of my purview as IT Deputy Director.
NCEI is home to an enormous warehouse of paper records of climate data. Keeping those resources safe is also what NCEI does. My role: ensure the spaces for all of those records is at the right temperature and humidity to preserve those records for al
Introducing new technologies to improve data workflows is a constant effort, and one I'm proud of. In the most recent years, I worked with a scaled agile framework of teams to introduce those technologies to NCEI and duplicate the workflows and the d
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Leadership