Makrand Kulkarni

• Storage and Compute
• Responsible for a staff of 20 and reporting into Sr
• Director, Cloud & Compute - an IT Storage & Compute IaaS engineering teams supporting Merchandising, Marketing, Supply Chain, Technology services, Target in India, HQ/Distribution centers portfolios of this established US retailer
• Responsibilities include developing and maintaining constructive dialogue with all business segments, engineering managers & product managers that leads to progressively improved products
• Provide managerial oversight over a technical area comprised of scrum teams and maintain knowledge of the product-line for the area of assignment
• Partner with portfolio teams in driving strategic priorities of the Backup, and VMware virtualization platforms
• Major responsibilities include plan-build-run VMware 7.0 virtualization platform comprised of 1500 hosts and 27000 VMs hosting business critical applications, databases, metric pipelines, and infrastructure services across Target’s data centers and distribution centers, in partnership with global teams
• Ensure production stability through IT services management
• Capacity/capital planning for the new consumer onboardings and year-on-year growth in terms of Server HW and SW licenses, develop roadmap/OKRs with a focus on programable infrastructure, Self-Service offerings, Reliability and Operational Excellence and Open-Source Technologies
• Ensure strategic approach towards initiatives/projects which aligns with goals and the organizational roadmap
• Accomplishments:
• Transitioned from the waterfall model to Agile and adopted Scrum framework
• A self-service Quarterly VM Review (QVR) auditing tool for the end-users for their quarterly VM reviews that ensures the relevance of the VMs in the system and compute resource optimization
• This audit tool ensures efficient utilisation of expensive compute resources
• Achieved 99.99% uptime, 20% incident reduction and much improved stability and reliability by implementing operational excellence principles and failure mode analysis – setup up right SLOs/SLIs, defined measurable metrics, setup alerting/monitoring and automated repeated activities like patching/upgrades/day-to-day jobs for better predictability, detectability and recoverability that led to enhanced consumer experience in VMware private could platform
• ESXi patches, server firmware and VMware major version upgrades were being done manually in past
• Took and initiate and drove the automation effort of these processes which not only introduced predictability, detectability and reliability but also sped up the overall upgrade process by 35-40% which helped meet the deadline
• Delivered software defined Object Storage platform using open-source distributed Storage system – CEPH and vendor product StorageGrid
• Spearheaded few million-dollar IT infrastructure implementation and lifecycle projects that has come out as a cost saving benefit to the organization in terms of improved performance and reduced expenses.

• Storage and Backup
• Responsible for a staff of 60 and reporting into Second Line Manager
• Leading Backup & Storage - an IT services team supporting multiple US customers
• Built strong technology teams, managed high-level engineers, and other supervisors/managers, involved in an array of technology exploration projects
• Responsibilities include builds, consulting and operations of the enterprise EMC Networker backup and Netapp NAS Storage platforms for various external customers
• Ensure operational excellence in terms of on-time and quality delivery of builds, consulting, Incident & Change requests including global outage escalations & their RCAs

• UNIX and Backup Administration
• Support Oracle’s customer base
• Responsible for UNIX/Backup administration of 600+ Oracle DB servers and apps hosted in the Texas data centers
• Backup administration - manage EMC networker & Veritas NetBackup servers on UNIX in 2 data centers located in Texas (US).

· System administration of 50 UNIX, 20 Windows servers and 2 Netapp NAS storage array along with Syncsort backup express backup tool

· Build, run and support of OS(Solaris, Linux and windows NT/2000) on production servers, SyncSort backup s/w on Unix for taking regular backup’s, NAS Storage boxes, manage Sun Storage A1000 and 3310 disk arrays

· Provide IT services to a user community of 60 employees

• UNIX, Wintel, Backup & NAS/DAS)
• UNIX, Backup and Storage administration of SUN/Dell production servers and NAS storage, patch management, backup administration through Syncsort Backup Express & ATL 1500 backup Silo on UNIX for 200+ Wintel & Solaris clients.