System Administrator – Distributed Check Writer System (DCW) Support, Upgrades, and Legacy System Retirement project for Florida Lottery

Overview of statement of work or project goals: There were 3 major goals of this project which were all successfully completed.

1. Upgrade the DCW Legacy systems and storage to newer and supported HP systems and storage.
2. Decommission the Legacy Hardware and Storage and dispose of according to specific guidelines.
3. Continue to manage and support the DCW application on the newer hardware until the application was rewritten, enhanced, and migrated to the Unix platform.

Overview of project deliverables: Upgrade Legacy Systems to newer hardware; Upgrade Legacy Storage to newer storage; Upgrade Operating System, all required Products, and install most current patches for OS and products; Performs comprehensive testing on the parallel systems before the migration target; Migrate Database records to the new systems; Migrate to new systems; Perform Semi-Annual Disaster Recovery testing; Maintain the DCW application throughout the contract until the application is ported to Unix

Main technical skills utilized for project: HP OpenVMS System Administration – OS upgrades, Layered products upgrades, patch installations performance monitoring and tuning ; Storage arrays – Legacy and modern HP SAN Storage management; Database Management on Oracle RDB Databases for the DCW application; TCPIP configuration and support on the DCW Servers; Printer and driver support for the DCW system; FTP with the Windows and Unix platforms; Nightly job processing support when needed; Disaster recovery site management support and testing twice per year; TSM and ABC backups and restores; Support Brocade San Storage Switches.

Project summary including outcomes achieved: The DCW Legacy Systems were at their end-of-life for HP Support. Some newer HP servers were acquired through another project with a vendor. The newer servers were had a 3 year warranty and the older systems had a very pricy maintenance contract. In order to satisfy the issue of these systems coming to the end-of-life and to save money on the maintenance contract, I needed to migrate the DCW application to the new HP servers. This involved a lot of planning, architecture, and testing on the new servers while supporting the live legacy systems simultaneously.
Our System Admin/DBA had to maintain and support the Disaster Recovery Site in Orlando Florida, and perform the semi-annual DR “live” testing.
After 5 months, Our System Admin/DBA Successfully migrated to the new servers. Of course, the development team had to perform their migration items as well.
All processing ran so much faster on the new servers. Nightly processing completed in record time.

Any Awards/Client Appreciation Received: Our System Admin/DBA received many compliments from Management and Co-workers.