Matthew
  Puckett

  Based in Saint Louis, Missouri I have spent my life in and around technology, and engineering. I have been a local IT professional for over 20 years with large corporations and datacenter scale technology/services. My life started with congenital cataracts at birth which led to many early in life surgeries. I first got into computers when my father would take me into his workplace to play games on their IBM PC’s (PS/2 Model 80). After a few months of begging and prodding I finally obtained my first home computer when I was 9. My father had acquired a Commodore 64 with a ton of games that quickly took most of my free time. Over many months, I was able to acquire the components to build an IBM PC XT with a dial-up modem, and joined the world of BBS’s. Using local BBS’s I was able to learn more about programming (BASIC/PASCAL), network design, and of course games.  I attended public schools until my 8th grade year at which time I left my home to attend the Missouri School for the Blind. It was during this time that my interests in computers and electronics had peaked. Quickly noticing the mass amount of time I would spend in the computer lab the school offered my the ability to assist the teacher with the maintenance of the computers. It was during this time that I was able to learn operations of an IBM System/36 midrange computer the school used for internal administration. This was later replaced by Novell Netware 4, and twisted pair ethernet in favor of the twin ax terminals. The school was also full of unique technology that I got to work with at will, such as braille embossers and speech synthesizers.  

  My career started in 1999 when I was offered a chance to join IBM Global Services as a server build administrator. Within my first two years I joined the global solutions architect team. The main areas of my focus were remote access solutions such as Citrix, Linux Administration, and Network Design/Administration. I was often deployed with the IBM ERS team to clean up datacenter, and technology disasters after events like floods, earthquakes, etc. This experience gave me the chance to learn and use hardware I had only dreamed of before. I was now everyday standing amongst rows of racks containing AS/400’s, SUN Microsystems Servers, IBM xSeries Servers, IBM pSeries Servers, and so much more. It was during this time that datacenters were migrating from Token Ring and Novell to Ethernet and Windows/Unix networks across their enterprise. I was deployed to work with finance, and healthcare companies to assist with and in most cases lead the direction of their migrations.

  Directly after the Token Ring phase died the new age of storage networking was taking shape. Now instead of SNA, or odd serial connected storage we had fibre channel SAN’s. IBM had just released their large scale storage system known as the Shark and needless to say I had to learn how to implement, and manage that beast as well. About this same time America faced tragedy with 9/11, and with that tragedy came business opportunities for IBM, Unisys, Microsoft, and many other vendors. I was tasked with deploying very large scale tape backup solutions utilizing TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) with IBM 88xx series tape arrays. IBM would often pair the shark and the TSM solutions together so I was able to focus in that area for quite some time. Then came the hard times of IBM with the loss of Lou Gerstner the company was re-shaping. It sold off most of it’s PC and hardware businesses as well as scaling back on professional services offerings. This shift left me to leave them after many years for a very large law firm.