About

Husband, Father, Grandpa, Brother, Uncle, and Professional geek.
Taking a journey through a shift in career focus to create a greater work/life balance.

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Introduction

Greetings. I am Rodney Rees and have lived in in the metropolis that is Bailey, CO for 11 glorious years.
I have been involved in some (read: most) facets of information technology for 40 years and was blessed to take my hobby and passion and turn it into an amazing 30-year long career.
From software development to helpdesk to SysAdmin and beyond, I have filled that role. Some of the key organizations I have taken care of over the course of my career can be found below. This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination as I have serviced well over 100 clients in the Central, West Central, and Northern TX areas.
I have built my life and my career on a few basic thoughts. The most important one to me is a quote from my mom when I was young and had no direction. She told me one day, “Son, it doesn’t matter what you decide to do with your life, but whatever it is be damned sure you are the absolute best at it!” The other comes from the old adage of “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” With those in mind I created a “policy” with my career of: Never tell a client or user, “No, I can’t do that.”
At times that “policy” has brought me more work than I anticipated. Those are the times that I learned a new skill and sometimes there were a few hard lessons to be learned. But that is how we grow as a person and a geek.

Key Organizations

• North Runnels Hospital District – 15 years
• Abilene Dermatology – 25 years
• Briley Investments/Holdings (TBG) – 20 years
• Petrosmith – 17 years
• Christian Homes and Family Svc – 15 years
• LCS Production Co. – 20 years
• Dr. Stanley D. Turner – 15 years
• Abilene Plumbing Supply, Co. – 20 years

Key Skills

Current and Past Experiences

November 1, 2014 – Present

Independent / Contractor, TX Wide – IT Director, System/Network Administrator, Architect, and Engineer

• All services that were offered as Quadrivium continued and expanded.
• Reduced clients to focus on Key Organization needs.
• Facilitated all Technical Project Management.
• Migrated clients to internal and/or external VoIP solutions.
• Implemented VMWare ESXi across a dual node cluster facilitating 20 Virtual Servers.
• Migrated using automation all Hyper-V environments from aging hardware to new along with OS revision changes.
• Automated report submission to state and federal agencies for HIPAA, CMS, or other healthcare regulations.
• Multiple major Electronic Medical Records (EMR) platform migrations managing all internal technical resources and project management and coordination with multiple teams and departments simultaneously. Recent migrations include from on-prem to cloud.
• Migrations from analog fax to HIPAA compliant electronic fax.
• Automated all system backups to local and Azure storage and other offsite resources.
• Automated and semi-automated migrations from on-prem Exchange to Office 365 and OneDrive.
• 30 physical environments controlling 100+ virtual environments managed via automation and scripting.

 November 1, 2005 – October 31, 2014

Quadrivium Technologies, Inc., TX Wide – Sr. System/Network Administrator – Owner

• All services that were offered with Pathfinders continued and expanded.
• Engineered and Automated Linux based remote backup solution to store branch location data (sales & accounting) at the home office. (TBG)
• Design, implement and maintain Wide Area Networks and Private Cloud services.
• Automated reporting across various facilities.
• Vendor relations and coordination across service providers.
• Customer relationship and client retention.
• Automated maintenance across networks to include system and application updates
• Telephone management services expanded to 30+ CitiBank branches across Central TX
• Initial implementations of HIPAA and HIPAA HITECH policies and procedures.
• Initial implementation of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems.
• Hospital Information Systems (HIS) migration from AS/400 to Linux/Windows solution.
• Project Management and Co-Management
• Employee and Team Management
• Automated firewall management
• Virtualized all bare-metal and moved to Hyper-V reducing costs while increasing Virtual Server count to facilitate the concepts behind isolation and containerization.
• Transitioned most systems and network management to automated processes to cut labor hour needs for common and routine tasks.
• Automated my employees out of a job

June 1, 2001 – October 31, 2005

Pathfinders, Co., Inc., Abilene, TX and Surrounding – Sr. System/Network Administrator

• Migrated company network from Netware to a Microsoft environment including messaging, file and print services, authentication, and authorization.
• Maintained internal and client voice communication including LEC/CLEC ordering/provisioning and relations, PBX systems and voice mail systems. Key brands NEC, Avaya, Toshiba and Panasonic.
• Maintained internal and client data communications needs across leased and commodity circuits. Provided and managed firewall/routing solutions. Key brands Cisco and Watchguard.
• Design, implement and maintain 75 client networks of varying user loads of 5-200 utilizing Linux and Microsoft based solutions.
• Project Co-Management – assistant to owner / Mechanical and Electrical Engineer
• Facilitated the purchase of local dial-up ISP and migrated to Wireless ISP (WISP) with ground up design using solely Linux solutions coupled with Motorola gear.
• Designed and implemented usage and utilization monitoring and graphing of ISP users for billing and analytical purposes.
• Implemented Linux based load balancing system as ISP expanded.
• Automated 75-80% of all ISP SysAdmin responsibilities